I am counting on Ted

Cate finished stage 2 in a little over 12 hours. She has not blogged or contacted me - no surprises there - but reading some of the other blogs it seems it was a very rugged stage indeed with bits where you had to sneak along the sides of mountains. 

I have not heard from her so assume she is now in stage 3.

If she lives until stage 5 she gets to walk 40 miles which I imagine will take about 20 hours. She will be walking through the night and has lights on her head. 

As you can see - she is very tenacious - which is why we now have a dog.

She has always astonished me and I am now officially flabbergasted.

I am going to meet the remains on Saturday morning and the bus leaves the hotel at 5 AM for a five hour trip. Can’t wait for that - especially after reading about road travel in Ecuador. 

There are lots of great photos of the runners and walkers HERE

Locally - 5 people were shot in a university accommodation place in Indianapolis. Apparently a a student’s phone was taken and this sort of provocation certainly warrants a really good shoot up. 

Which prompted me to look up the statistics for mass shootings - and there is actually a site that tracks mass shootings. Ah - the internet!

So far this year there have been 207 (It is a couple of days out of date and does not include Indy on the weekend). That is not common or garden variety shootings - there are many thousands of those - just mass shootings which the site says are instances in which four or more people are shot. 

The FBI takes a more jaundiced view of these statistics. For them there have to four or more people murdered for it to qualify as a mass shooting - injuries do not count. 

But we take these things in our stride here - there are many more important things to occupy us.

For example - because the Trumpet is leading the polls the other candidates are falling all over themselves to see who can make the most outrageous statement to get into the spotlight.

The winner so far is Mike Huckabee who said that - because of the proposed agreement with Iran - the president is marching the Israelis towards the door of the oven.

That will  be hard to beat but I am counting on Ted Cruz to come up with a scorcher in the next few days. He has never let me down in the past. And Rick Perry could be a dark horse here - he has come up with some ball tearers.