To Bed Late and Up Early

Nothing quite like turning out the lights at 2am and waking up at 6:10am. I was wide awake so figured I may as well go ahead and get up. I hate that feeling.

I decided to check Dell for the new computer. Of course, being female and using their "build your own" option I managed to lock up the screen by deciding to toggle too quickly back and forth between components. I knew I should have gone with the list view rather than the nice scrolling components bar. geez

Gave the man a quick ring to say good morning and to watch for fog. (Love those summer mornings here when the humidity stays above 95% or so and the temperature overnight doesn't drop below the mid 70s. My air conditioner has run nonstop for the last two or three days. In the week prior, I did manage to get it off for a few hours in the morning before the day's heat began in earnest.) He's stressed and busy with this being the final week of the quarter. It is nice that he always asks how I'm feeling. I let him go quickly when he came upon a patch of fog. The goofball factor here increases exponentially when driving in anything other than sun on dry pavement. A light misting of rain will cause traffic to slow to 45mph on the freeway.

I would hate to see these people driving in the rain in the Seattle area. Some of those people even scared me. Two inches of standing water on the freeway, the flow of traffic is steady at 65mph. I had to have the mirror heaters on, it was raining that hard. And, here come the morons doing 75 and 80mph, spraying rooster-tails of water fifteen feet in the air and blinding other drivers around them with the spray, not that the rain was doing a less than effective job of seriously decreasing visibility in the first place.

Driving in Chicago has to be the best for braking on to the break down lanes in order to keep from rear-ending the car in front of you when traffic suddenly goes from 85mph to zero and then just as quickly and mysteriously resumes at the previous rate of speed. My first time driving in Chicago, I was leaving O'Hare and quickly found myself doing 80mph in the third of five lanes of traffic. I looked to the far right lane and saw a flat bed semi truck doing at least 90mph. That was all my cue to immediately apply more pressure to the vertical pedal on the right. LOL

The DC/Maryland/Virginia outerbelt has to be the best for having some moron stop at the top of the entrance ramp and waiting for all four to five lanes of traffic to clear before pulling on to the freeway. I was back here and my friend, Carolyn, was with me. We were rolling up the ramp to I270 from Cleveland Avenue when we had someone do that. She was like, OMG! I was like, Oh, I know this one from DC... I down-shifted, passed them on the right shoulder, and merged on to the freeway. No problem.

In Southern California, the gridlock is well known and notorious. When traffic does move though, it moves... at about 80 to 85mph in packs. There will be long stretches of vacant freeway in between clusters of 20 to 40 cars all moving at the same rate of speed. The propensity to weave in and out of traffic and get ahead of the pack is pretty much non-existent. Speeding on your own, in those vacant spots of asphalt between the packs, is how you get ticketed out there. It's sort of impossible to pull-over one person out of that many cars all running together, but one goofball on their own is an entirely different story.

Pick any city with any sort of population at all and rush hour traffic sucks. St. Louis is miserable because of the cluster-fuck of freeways downtown. Cowlumbus is the same way. Let's merge two freeways on to one and make people who wish to stay on the north-south interstate move from the right lane (which is shared with the east-west interstate) to the left lane (which is four lanes over and shared with another interstate spur) in a 3/4 mile stretch. Makes for some very fun accident related traffic snarls and some horribly wicked accidents; unfortunately many times with fatalities. The fatality count would probably be higher if it were not for the fact that the trauma center is about 4 blocks from that particular nasty stretch of freeway.

I went ahead and stayed up. Washed some laundry, helped Amanda clean house a bit, watched the kids while she took a quick shower.

Think I'm going to take a quick nap before work.