The flip side of Mac & PC

No matter which side of the issue you come down on—or if you're like me and don't really care—you've got to admit that as spoofs go, these have the originals dead to rights.

Now playing: Spock's Beard, The Kindness of Strangers

Transform yourself

It really was wrong of me to show you my M&M alter ego and not tell you where you could go to reinvent yourself. Enter the M&M Character Creator:

Now... go forth and get candy coated.

P.S - Here's my sweet wife...

Random Thursday

Wear Yellow

My life as an M&M:

Pizza what?

After a brutal, wreck-littered, stuck-behind-aimless-wanderers commute home from work, I stopped at a Pizza Hut a block up from our house. The traffic held me up long enough that I didn't get to see Turtle before she had to leave for her meeting, so she told me to fend for myself.

That's okay. I like pizza.

I walked in, and the gal at the counter promptly told me to wait. So I did. And I did for five minutes, while she was back in the back visiting with someone. When she finally got around to waiting on me, I asked for a supreme personal pan and laid my cash on the counter.

"Your phone number?"

"You don't need my phone number," I suggested, adding the Jedi Master wave of the hand to reinforce the point. "I have cash."

"I have to have your phone number, or I can't enter the order," she said.

I thought about that briefly. There I was, standing right in front of her with cash in my hand, and I had to give up a phone number too? I could have given her the number for time and temperature, but I didn't.

"I see," I said, pulling my legal tender back across the counter and stuffing it back in my wallet. "Well, you have a nice day. Bless your heart."

Twenty feet away, the neighboring Subway shop was perfectly happy to take my order without a background check. The young woman just smiled, welcomed me, and efficiently made me a tasty sandwich. The only questions I was required to answer were "What kind of bread would you like?", "Would you like it toasted?", and "What kind of cheese?" Those seemed relevant, so I happily answered them.

A Subway club was probably better for me than a supreme personal pan pizza anyway.

It's official

Back before the holidays, I made the decision to join a friend's small MS 150 team and ride in honor of his wife (also a friend), as well as several others in the same circle of friends, who also live with multiple sclerosis. We're the Wheeler Dealers, a reference to poker and The Gang's love of gambling. The jerseys are snazzy, with the faces of the folks we're riding for emblazoned on playing cards over a green background.

As of this evening, I'm officially signed up. It's time to start getting back in shape (I haven't been on the bike, on the road, since November) and start figuring out how I'm going to meet my minimum fund raising requirement without having to reach too deeply into my pocket. Any of you MS 150 veterans with an interest in sharing your tips? I'm all ears.

I feel for you (but don't tell anybody)

Every now and then, my lovely bride reacts so strongly to something she sees on TV or hears on the radio that I'm left feeling like I might have spent too much of my time in the company of machines. It could be argued that this is less the cause for my apparent lack of empathy than a symptom, but the fact is that I often take as facts of life the same things that nearly reduce Turtle to tears. Driving down the road, I see a bag of trash that fell off the back of someone's truck; she sees someone's German shepherd, hit by a vehicle and left for dead. She hears about someone setting a cat on fire or sticking a dog in a laundromat washer and turning on the hot water and is furious; I hear the same story, and I'm disgusted but not surprised.

That's why I found some encouragement in a chance encounter I had during Monday's icy slog home from work. At a stop light,* I found myself behind a black Kia Spectra hanging off the back of a tow truck. The right rear taillight was obliterated, as were parts of the rear and quarter panels surrounding it. I could see that the hood was buckled and most of the right front of the car caved in. Ouch.

As I waited for the light to change, I also noticed that there was a sort of fuchsia-furred tribble-like thing hanging from the rearview mirror. Young woman, I inferred.

The temporary license tag on the back read "1-29". When I bought Dorian, my temp tags were only good for about three weeks, so I further concluded she'd only had the car for about a week and a half.

That sucks, I thought. On my mental movie screen, I saw the Spectra's driver headed to work at The Gap (probably because I was stopped alongside a mall at the time). She'd rather not, because she's nervous about having to drive her new car on the slick roads with all the maniacs, but she has to. She has a car payment now, and she can't get off work. Suddenly, brake lights flash in front of her, and she steps on her brakes—new, unfamiliar brakes that work much better than the ones on her old, clapped out Toyota. The car starts to skid, the rear end slowly swinging to the right.

WHAM! She slams into the rear of the car in front of her. The slide turns into a spin, slamming the right rear of her car into the side of a car in the next lane. What a tragic mess, I thought, giving the unfortunate Kia owner a mental pat on the shoulder.

As the light turned, some young chicklet with a cell phone pressed to her ear whipped her Honda Civic between the mashed Spectra and Dorian's front bumper. My imagined scenario with the Kia driver changed, and my newly-rediscovered empathy evaporated as quickly as you could say "Hello... State Farm?"

NOTE: Apparently, that last paragraph was just a bit too poetic to be clearly understood. Dorian is not wrecked. Quite dirty, still, but unharmed. My State Farm comment was made in reference to a future that might have been, if not for Dorian's four-wheel disc brakes and what's left of my aging reflexes.

* Some people call them "traffic lights", but if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, I say it's a duck.

Winter Blast!

[cough]

To hear the local news stations tell it, the Dallas/Ft. Worth area is entering a second ice age. I guess they have to do something to stir up some excitement, but it's not really necessary. Just trying to get from Point A to Point B is excitement enough.

I got suckered twice this week. First, on Monday, when we had an "ice storm" that turned out to be significantly less severe than the meteoroligists had been trumpeting for the previous four days. I was at work by 7:20, but the office didn't open until noon. Today, we awoke to "snow" (in fact, a sort of airborne slush that only looks white when it accumulates), and not a warning shot from the weather persons. The sand truck drivers must've been depending on the TV weather, because when I hit the roads at 6am, there wasn't a sign that any of the overpasses had been treated.

Not that I cared. I took to the side streets where the only hazard I had to face was the frozen stuff, not some moron in an Econoline talking on his cell phone instead of concentrating on my brake lights. By 7:30, I had arrived at my office, where I immediately called Turtle to let her know I was still alive. Then I went looking for the usual idiots stalwarts who show up regardless of the crap on the roads.

My boss's boss looked up from his desk. "What are you doing here? The office is closed."

"I could ask you the same thing," I said. "But the fact is that the message I got when I called in to check said the office would be open at 9am."

"You're the third person who's told me that, but the office is closed." He then dialed the main number and let me hear for myself. Obviously, it had been changed since Turtle had checked while I was en route.

So I checked a few emails, drank a second cup of coffee, made a trip to the men's, and turned Dorian north again.

My morning in a picture:



(Hmm. That's interesting. Looks like Blogger's using Picasa for images now. Google truly owns my soul, now.)

I know: it doesn't look like much, but there's enough on the roads that I had to chip the slush dingleberries out of Dorian's wheel wells before tucking him in to the garage.

Maybe I'll go take a nap with the kittens...

Yes we have no words today

Sorry. Nothing new to report, because I used up all the best words writing novella-sized comments on other people's blogs, today.

Are you pondering what I'm pondering?

Why is it that spammers like Alexandra, who keeps e-mailing me about "emaciate whirlpool", constantly warn that "This is our final attempt to reach you"—but it never is?

Meanwhile...

The latest batch of search terms (not including the poor souls still trying to figure out how to make their cars and their RoadRunner internet service work):

• sasquatch's cousin Yeah... you know, I can't remember her name either. We only went out a couple times.*
• carrie underwood's nickname in college Just because we drove past her home town on the way back from our holiday trip, that makes me an expert?
• road rage shooting plano texas I could see that being a possibility...
• b48a7bb1654c8f50f2e1aee00dcb99828be05147360a Oh yeah? Well, 6120686578206f6e20796f7520746f6f.

* And having said that, I'll probably receive a nasty letter from the same lawyer who's representing the cavemen in those Geico ads.


Now playing: Coldplay, X & Y.

Down with those *&%#@ cyclists!

I know that some of my accounts of encounters with hostile and inattentive motorists have been met with some skepticism—and I really do understand. How can one guy have that much bad luck with his fellow humans unless he's doing something to bring it on himself?

That said, I'd like to provide an illustration of at least one instance of the sort of thinking that keeps me on full alert every time I go out for a ride. Check out the first comment in response to a posting about a proposed safe passing bill, on the local paper's cycling blog.

Ahhh...

The first week back to work after the holiday trip was reasonably calm; but after being off work for ten days and quite a few days during November, as well, four days seemed like a very long week. I'm getting back into the swing of things, though.

Turtle and I have been chipping away at the task of getting our new laptops set up the way each of us like things. Unlike Bret's new baby, ours aren't the fanciest or the fastest of Dell's line (or anyone else's), but they're nearly as fast as the four-year-old machine I use for my daily development tasks at work. That's a huge improvement over Turtle's old Toshiba, which had a pronounced tendency to lock up while trying to load just the antivirus software.

Aside from the speed increase and the ability run applications that were unavailable to us with the old Win98 machine, the most pleasant surprise is how much more sensitive the internal wireless card seems to be than the Linksys wireless-g card we were using on the old laptop. Add to that the relative simplicity of connecting to a new wireless network under WinXP using Dell's wireless connection manager, and life is going to be much easier for Turtle. One of the main reasons for her getting a new laptop was so that she could use it from her rented office space and... oh... the sort of upscale coffee shops where she tends to meet with prospective clients and collaborators. She never could get the old laptop to connect, because the process was just too fiddly.

For my part, I'm quickly becoming spoiled by the wide, crisp LCD display that at the same time is sharper and brighter than my flat screen monitor at home and handles wide content better than my cathode ray monitor at work. The Synaptics pointing device was a bit awkward, at first—I was used to the old laptop's "nubbin", which I could use without moving my fingers from the home position—but I'm getting used to it. Enabling the scrolling gestures and modifying the hot spots to my own preferences helped.

The new machine's battery actually holds a charge, and with that comes previously unexplored mobility. Unless it's during the day when I'm at work, you'll never know where I might be blogging from. This has been quite handy, this weekend. We've kicked off the new year for the Ride of Silence™, which means that I've had a torrent of e-mails from event organizers confirming their information. Each of these must then be update in the database and activated for display on the site. I've been hauling the laptop with me wherever I go in the house so I can keep working. Sweet.

And the heat generated by the thing keeps my lap warm.

Your mileage may vary

Over the past couple weeks, several people have asked what kind of gas mileage I get with the new car. The answer is "it depends".

Dorian is rated for 31 mpg on the highway. In the first leg of the trip, burning the MTBE-laden fuel we have here in the metromess, he got about 29 mpg. Throughout the rest of the trip, the fuel economy was between 31 and 32 mpg.

Seems to me that any benefit that the extremely toxic MTBE might have in decreasing emissions would be lost because we're burning more fuel. But hey, what do I know? It's only math.

Home again, home again

Jiggity-jig.

Three travel days, three days at my folks', three days at my in-laws'. 1845 miles under Dorian's belted radials, and at least five more pounds over my belt than when we left our driveway.

We had a nice trip again this year. At Mom and Dad's, it was lots of hugs and kisses from the godkids. I just can't believe how big they're getting. Godgirl is five going on eighteen; Godboy is two and... well, he'll probably be less unhappy next year, when he's three. Both are so adorable that it makes my teeth hurt. Along the way, there was some adult conversation, a couple TV football games, and a touch of some kind of stomach bug.

Also, the beginnings of another round of holiday package tag with UPS. You see, Turtle and I ordered a couple laptops for ourselves, and Dell decided to ship them a full six days before they were supposed to. To our house. Where we weren't.

I jumped on the UPS web site, called customer service, and was told that there was nothing they could do until the first failed delivery. Once the first attempt failed, I should call the local depot to make different arrangements.

"Oh. Okay. Can you give me the number for the depot?" I asked.

"No, we don't have that information."

"But I know from past experience that the local depots' numbers are unlisted precisely to prevent customers from calling there," I said. "How am I supposed to call them if I can't get the number?"

"I don't have that information," he repeated. "You'll have to call the depot for that number."

Blink. If that's the sort of Möbius thinking that drives UPS shipping logistics, it's no wonder I have such a hard time connecting with my packages. There ended up being a lot of tail chasing over the next few days, but Turtle hit on the idea to call our pet sitter. She gave us the prized InfoNotice number from the dreaded sticky note stuck to our front door 700+ miles away, and we were able to use that number to re-route our computers to my work address. There they'll sit until 2007.

Where was I? Oh yeah... from my folks' place, we headed over to Turtle's mom and dad's. We're not used to the constant buzz of activity that surrounds small children, so we were really looking forward to the quieter environs. Of course, we forgot how loud the Turtle parents' house can be when the relatives are all together. But aside from that one afternoon, it was much calmer and quite relaxing. We had a wonderful visit with my in-laws and even found time to have a nice lunch with a couple of Turtle's friends from her old job.

Dad (as I've become comfortable enough to call him) and I made our rapidly-becoming-traditional trip to the liquor store to pick up my 2007 bottle of Jack Daniel's Old No. 7. Around these parts, all we have are wine and beer sales, so I don't get in to real liquor stores very often. It's kind of fascinating to me to walk the aisles and marvel at all the fancy bottles and types of liquids fermented and distilled.

Somewhere along the line, it occurred to us to wonder: if both the green label and black label varieties of Jack Daniel's are now 80 proof (black label used to be 90 proof), then what's the difference? We asked one of the employees, and the answer was "none". Apparently, the same liquor is sold under both green and black labels because black label devotees such as myself have a traditional bias against the green label and wouldn't buy it.

Marketing. Gotta love it.

We got home last evening, and as usual the cats won't let us out of their sight today. We made some tentative plans to spend this evening with friends, but after being on the road for the past nine days, I'll be quite happy to just stay at home if the opportunity presents itself. In case I'm not awake at midnight, HAPPY NEW YEAR!

DON'T. PANIC.

Turtle and I are "fixin' ta" head out on our holiday trip bright dark and early tomorrow morning and won't be back until the day before the ball drops. Dad joined the 21st century earlier this year and now has broadband internet, so I may have a chance to check in before we get home. Or I may not.

With all the distractions—such as my two godhatchlings, my ex-high school crush (who wants to talk to Turtle about her business), Turtle's ex-hair stylist, and my in-laws' bottle of Old No. 7—who can say?

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a complete lack of fruitcake.

A mare-brained theory

Ever since The Da Vinci Code hit the big screen, The Discovery Channel and The History Channel have been running documentaries purporting to debunk the life of Christ. For years, they've been running UFO programs so chock-full of nuts that they should be sponsored by Snickers, Planters, and Aunt Myrtle's fruitcake.

On occasion, I stumble upon one of these while flipping channels and watch for a while, like a rubbernecking commuter who spots an overturned pickup truck on his way to work—but not recently. Which is why I was a little surprised by the strange burgoo that my subconscious was cooking up when the alarm went off at 5:20 this morning.

The Christmas-themed outlandishness went something like this: Mary, mother of Jesus, remained a virgin not because of anything to do with divinity or miracles but because she didn't give birth to Jesus at all. The whole thing was a bit of legerdemain on the part of benevolent space aliens who implanted baby Jesus in the womb of a mare.*

When Mary and Joseph made the trek to Bethlehem, it was this same mare who carried Mary on her back and Jesus in her belly. Then, once they were all settled away in the manger, the mare gave birth. Mary took all the credit and the presents.

Speaking of presents, it turns out that the star followed by the three magi wasn't actually a star at all. It wasn't even a comet. It was the alien mother ship, decloaked and running with all its exterior lights on, that guided the wise men to Bethlehem.

The views and opinions expressed in this dream do not necessarily state or reflect those of the author.

The holiday trip can't come soon enough. I obviously need some rest.


* The equine in question being a horse, not a donkey. It seems that my dream generator's capacity for blasphemy has its limits.

Pitch Black

Okay, not really—but with it being overcast and gloomy outside and the lights periodically going out in here, the lumens are a bit scarce. You see, between the Great Purge of '06 and the impending holidays, the cubicle farm in which I sit and craft my tight, elegant code is a ghost town. Even the tumbleweeds seem to have packed up and moved on to greener pastures.

Therein lies the crux of the apostrophe, because the fluorescent light bars are on an electrical circuit controlled by a timer and a motion detector. If nothing within its cold, uncaring gaze moves for 10 minutes or so, "Boom, Boom! Out Go The Lights!" This pleases my taskmasters, because it not only means that I'm head-down, being productive instead of getting up for a cup of coffee or a trip to the men's, but it also saves electricity.

So far today, the lights have gone out half a dozen times or so, and it's making two of the three remaining cubicle farmers a bit goofy around the edges (the third is a dour chap who, frankly, doesn't see the humor in much of anything).

The last time it happened, I heard a snort and a chuckle, then "Lights out... uh-huh... blast, blast, blast."

Peter Wolf, "Lights Out". Nicely played.

I jumped up out of my chair and gesticulated to catch the attention of the motion detector and turn on the lights.

"Tha-row ya hands in tha air, and wave 'em like you just don't care!"

And there was light—but also dead silence. I guess adding that last "WHOOP! WHOOP!" was just a bit too much.

A matter of perspective

Over the past couple months or so, I've seen several interviews with actor Ryan O'Neill. In each, the interviewer eventually got around to asking, with varying degrees of tact, about Farrah Fawcett's on-going battle with intestinal cancer.

"I guess you can really relate to what Farrah's going through, huh? Because of your own battle with cancer?"

Now, it's always a little difficult to tell when an actor's reactions are genuine and whether he's just... yanno; but O'Neill's response to this question is invariably an expression of mild irritation mixed with pity.

"Compared with what she's going through," he says seriously, "I didn't even have cancer. I took a pill, and that was it."

I think I know how he feels. I see little kids on TV with a couple pathetic wisps of hair left over after their radiation therapy. I see the the young woman with the large, dark eyes, gauntly beautiful with head wrapped in a scarf. I see the news story about the wife and mother who had both breasts and her uterus removed because tests revealed that she was genetically predisposed toward both types of cancer.

I'm a cancer survivor, technically. The fellow cyclist and bladder cancer survivor who gave me my first yellow bracelet solemnly discouraged me from downplaying any cancer. I understand what he was trying to tell me, but like Ryan O'Neill, I look around at the battles that others are fighting and can't help thinking that my thyroid surgery and one little radioactive iodine pill were hardly like having cancer at all.

And I thank God.

'Tis the season

...to try and bag yourself a cyclist to strap on your hood. Apparently.

Let me set this up for you: 70 °F, sunny, and I'm off work. Turtle tells me I'd be a fool not to go for a bike ride; I can't argue with that kind of logic, and off I go.

Madness.

You: The school bus driver in the next neighborhood over.
Me: Wondering how it is that you have no qualms about sitting with your stop sign stuck out, holding up traffic while you socialize with one of the riders' parents; but you're in such a rush that you have to make your right turn across my path rather than wait for the additional five seconds it would have taken me to pass the side street on to which you turned.

You: The high-and-tight mouth breather who parked his fire engine red monster truck in the middle of the road while he chatted with the guy in his front yard.
Me: Flattered that, after my appraisal of your choice of parking spots, you cared enough to hunt me down, pull up next to me, and lean across the seat with your middle finger out the passenger window. Boy, you sure put me in my place, and I'm touched that you spent half an hour of your life to make sure that you found me and delivered your message.

You: The lady crossing guard who saw me coming, marched out in the middle of the street, and held up her sign to stop me—the only moving vehicle in sight.
Me: Glad to know you're out there keeping the neighborhood safe. If you hadn't stopped me for the full minute that it took for the stroller-pushing dad reach your crosswalk, it could have been blood and entrails all over the road. And I hope you choked didn't choke on your wad of gum while you were snickering.

Merry freakin' Christmas to the lot of ya.

Nutcracker? Sweet!

Last season, my favorite holiday music came from a video of a home light show that would have been the envy of a Las Vegas casino. This year, it's a video over at Specialized featuring as its soundtrack "The Nutcracker Suite" played entirely on bicycle parts. And it sounds great! I just wish the clip were longer.

There's a bit more about the project and slightly different version of the performance at Peter Kirn's Create Digital Music blog, if you're interested.

The music is the work of Flip Baber (a.k.a., "Johnny Random"), who's pretty darned amazing, as you can hear from this sampling of his work. It's enough to send a fellow Googling for a full-length CD, but I have paying work to accomplish.

Update

I've also discovered that Peter Kirn has posted an entire entry devoted to bicycle music. Who knew?

It's official: I'm a fogey

After spending all day off work and pretty much all day doing pro bono web monkey things*, I emerged from my cave and discovered I had an hour to kill before it was time for Heroes. I began flipping channels. Deal Or No Deal on NBC. Yech. King of Queens on CBS. I like Kevin Whatshisname, but... enh. Billboard Music Awards on Fox. Janet Jackson was on, and I'd just like to say "yikes".

I used to be a mild fan (an oxymoron, technically), back a ways. I even own a well-worn copy of Rhythm Nation 1814... but oh my stars and garters, what happened to Janet? She was up on stage with a bunch of growling gangstas and a huge lighted sign that read "S.E.X." The sound kept going off for five seconds at a time, and I thought there was something wrong with the idiot box until it dawned on me that the network was muting large chunks of Ms. Jackson's performance.

Disgusted, I went back to flipping and landed on ABC and a spirited performance by a Baptist choir on Gospel Jubilee. Now, I'm not a huge fan of the genre, but I was amused to realize that I was finding it more entertaining than Janet Jackson's koochie show.

Still curious, I flipped back to the Billboard awards just in time to see Nellie Furtado win an award for "Promiscuous", off her latest album... Loose.

Mein Gott. I realized it was all I could do to keep from channeling my grandfather's trademarked "I don't know what the world's coming to."


* Except for a worthwhile two hours spent re-watching Miracle. I'm pleased to say that the U.S. team won again.

Great Scott! That's trivia!

Not long ago, one of you wrote about the TV ad for a major credit card's check card. Two things before I get on with it:

1. I apologize for not being able to remember which of you it was. Believe me, I searched.
2. Does it strike anyone else as ironic? A credit card company plugging a card that sucks funds directly from one's checking account. Pretty much the anti-credit, as I see it.

Anyway, after reading about this bit of anti-cash propaganda (as one of you so aptly observerd), I started noticing the ad when it played—and not so much for its intended meaning as because of its soundtrack.

Have you ever watched a [suppressing gag reflex] Warner Brothers cartoon involving the operation of an assembly line and wondered what that peppy, industriously familiar tune was? Have you ever listened to Rush's "La Villa Strangiato" and wondered why that one passage reminded you of Looney Toons?

I have, so this morning I gave my trivial-minded, obsessive evil twin his head and came up with the answer. The tune? "Powerhouse". The composer? Raymond Scott. Ah... there's the real story. It turns out that the composer was a one of those little-known artists who thought out of the box and mostly labored in obscurity because of it.

I never was much good at reading articles in the encyclopedia and restating their content in my own words. If you're interested in learning about Scott, I encourage you to check out the Wikipedia article about him.

Now playing: Cake, Fashion Nugget

The bigger chill

Yesterday (don't hurt yourself; it was a Thursday) was the first of North Texas' one or two annual ice storms.

Any of "youse" from areas of the multiverse that regularly experience both temperatures below 50 °F and precipitation in both liquid and solid species, feel free to cackle loudly. You're absolutely entitled, and I can afford to be beneficent given the fact that you'll be experiencing this sort of weather for the next three months. I, meanwhile, will likely be back in shirt sleeves by the end of the weekend.

Wednesday evening, I had no sooner arrived home from work when the local television news programs were ecstatically and endlessly reporting the impending arrival of a strong storm system rolling in from Canada. Rain! Freezing rain! Sleet! Dogs and cats, living together! Pandemonium.

They were at least partially correct, of course. The merest hint of rain, much less freezing rain strikes fear into the hearts of the locals in this unnaturally warm, moisture-deprived part of the country. Never mind that they're all driving Hummers and F-150s. When the sky starts to fall, when clouds cover the sun, or when the temperature drops to 40 °F, they naturally conclude that all roads are impassable at speeds above 25 mph.

Normally, I wouldn't have cared. Under such circumstances, my employers typically close the office, and I get a free day off. This time, though, I had procrastinated and neglected to turn in my benefits enrollment form that was due today. Since I was scheduled to be off work today, and since the form could only be printed from within the company's intranet, I had to rouse Dorian from a sound sleep and drive back in to Dallas. It was 78 °F when I left the house; an hour later, the temperature had dropped 48 degrees and it was pouring rain.

It poured all night, and I smiled as I lay awake picturing all that rain draining into our depleted reservoirs. As some point, I thought I heard water dripping, which meant getting out of bed, getting dressed, and climbing into the attic space with a flashlight to check for roof leaks. There were none.

Come morning, I was sure there was no hurry to get around for work. The last time we had weather like this, I drove in to work, arrived just in time to receive word that the office was closed for the day, and turned right around. I waited until 7am, when the office closings are announced, and discovered we were open for business. Now an hour behind my usual departure time, I showered, dressed, and finally made it out the door by 8:30—just in time to battle my way through full-on rush hour with the bulk of the locals (who, to reinforce the point, cannot drive in temperatures below 40 degrees).

Throughout the morning, the weather worsened. I could hear sleet rattling against the window behind my cubicle and wondered what the Powers That Be were thinking. By 2:30, someone had apparently been watching the TV in the break room and noted all the mile-high overpasses choked with feckless drivers trying to crash their SUVs and 1983 Sentras through the concrete retaining walls. The office closed, and I headed home, avoiding all the giant overpasses, but coming to a half-hour standstill when I made the mistake of getting on an expressway that was moving well until I merged on to it. The problem? Every overpass (normal height) had at least one totaled car or upside-down SUV blocking the way.

What a bunch of dum-dum heads.

Fortunately, Dorian has a lovely automagic transmission and a CD player spinning some sweet tunes. Another Falling Down incident averted. By the time I arrived home, the local news was reporting temperatures around 13 °F.

By Monday (another vacation day) we'll be back to the low 50s. I may even put on my tights and get in a bike ride.