I'm back!  

As I mentioned, I was out for a bit with some live-blogging responsibilities for the College Football bowl season, but now that that's all over with but for next week's final Championship Game, I'm back.

What do you want to do this year, huh?  What do you want to talk about?  Zen?  Music? Potential? What?  You name it.

Meanwhile, a quick story about patience:  Driving to work on this exceptionally cold morning, I was disappointed to encounter traffic on a side street between my home and the highway.  I've gotten used to traffic on the highway (this is Atlanta), but didn't expect to come to a full stop for several minutes next to our neighborhood hospital.

After a while, cars started to slowly inch forward, but it was still frustrating.  I couldn't see what was holding up the traffic ahead of me, and I speculated that it might be related to the on-going construction at the hospital.  Or maybe it was just the gross incompetence of the new traffic cop recently assigned to the hospital parking lot, who, unlike his predecessor, seemed more interested in immediately getting customers in and out of the parking lot without delay than in the flow of traffic on the street.  I was getting angry at both the cop and at the construction.

Then I got up to the blockage and saw what it was - the traffic cop was down on the ground, laying in front of a car that had apparently just hit him.  An extremely distraught woman was hovering over him (the driver?), and ironically, it being right in front of a hospital, first responders had not yet arrived on the scene.  Cars barely had enough room to squeeze between a telephone pole and the officer's outstretched legs, and even though it felt disrespectful to drive so close to the feet of an accident victim laying on the ground, I squeezed through out of sympathy to all the people who were now behind me in traffic.

It was all a reminder of some very old lessons - don't jump to conclusions, and things aren't always what they seem.  Don't get angry over what you don't understand.  And the job of a traffic cop is cold in the winter, hot in the summer, almost always unappreciated, and more dangerous than we think.  We should be kinder to them, and not get so caught up in our own predicament.