prog: (Default)
A paramedic's view of why you should always wear a seatbelt, over on Making Light.

Sometime around now is the 10th anniversary of the time I destroyed my Chevy Nova in a nighttime head-on with a big pickup truck, up in Bangor. I walked away from it with a bruised liver, which healed within days. The bruise was from my seatbelt squeezing my ribs tight. If I hadn't received that bruise, I would probably be dead, or something like it. (The other driver was in an enormous vehicle and barely felt anything. He was very kind, though.)

I kind of shudder to think that I didn't make a habit of putting on seatbelts until college. Dopey as it seems, the gory lectures in the driver's ed course I took right before freshman year sold me on it. When I was growing up, only my brother Peter had a hard rule about everyone in his car being belted - probably because he was scared straight by the same sorts of lectures. My parents are old enough to have missed all that, and so I rarely buckled up through most of my childhood. Yeesh.
prog: (smiley)
I don't get angry at peoples' bad driving; not at all. I tend to completely ignore that, actually, since I assume that everyone drives like a lunatic and so nothing's really surprising.

I do get blindly, almost murderously angry at people who get angry while they're driving and take it out on their fellow motorists or my fellow peds, especially through sudden torrents of verbal abuse. These are the people that I flip off. This helps soothe the fantasies I have about pulling them from their cars and beating them to death right there on the street.

I mean, I have the fantasies anyway, but at least I feel I did something about it.
prog: (Default)
I can drive again. And bless them, Zipcar didn't blink at my offering of a temporary license number, and I had no problems re-activating my account and reserving a car to visit the parents and Ricky over Xmas.

I haven't driven in nearly 11 months! I should get some practice in before hitting the highways again, I suppose...

In retrospect I wish I had shaved this morning; the photograph looks like a disheveled, grinning Hanna-Barbera cartoon man with jaw shadow. I went with a mellow closed-mouth smile, not a psycho-toothy grin, but I kind of wish I did now.

They took $90 from me, which was approx. twice as much as I was expecting to pay. What can you do, though? It's the state.

Slide

Nov. 27th, 2006 11:32 pm
prog: (Default)
Browsing my friendsfriends I find this post and think back on some fine midwinter driving adventures on Southern Maine's highways, running one gopher errand or another for the Bangor Daily.

I wonder if it will snow more than twice in Boston this winter.
prog: (Default)
Been kind of messed up lately. My sleep schedule's been absolute shit for no real reason. I got up at 2 in the afternoon today, after going to bed at 3. That's atrocious in like three different ways. (If you say "Not the least of which is your sleeping in reverse-time" I will punch you in the nose. Look, I just didn't want to write "3 a.m.", because that sounded too precise, OK? And now you're making me type in all this extra crap instead. I hate you.) Now saddled with a splitting headache like I always get on days when I sleep too much.

Jesus, this sleep thing is really getting chronic. Maybe I should see a therapist or something except oops I don't have medical coverage anymore son of a bitch.



I don't feel I'm hardcore enough about the business but that's just cuz I haven't done much with the tech for a couple of days. I have a concrete project to do: a tutorial that will make use of our now-released client application. I have generated some neato ideas for it that I need to discuss with my colleagues, as soon as my head clears up a bit, and I position myself so that I'm actually awake at the same time they are.



The Manchester half-day trip was pleasant; I enjoyed driving on the highway for the first time in a while, and on an unfamiliar highway too (that is, something besides the 93/95 stretch between Somerville and Waterville). My first interstate use of Zipcar, too.

The iBook is still in the cardboard box my parents packed it in; Ricky wrote "WHITEY IN RECIDANCE" on it. Mom said it's supposed to be "residence". This is weird because Rick writes me often and is a fairly good speller, so I dunno if this was some private joke of his or not. (One of the manifestations of his illness is a frequent obsession with words, making up ways to take apart and reconstruct them, imagining finding endless hidden truths in the process that are entirely divorced from their meaning or real etymology.)
prog: (Default)
Have successfully penetrated the Chez Charla perimeter and spent the night snoring in the guest room. iBook is happily connected to house Ethernet. Assisted in unsuccessful bid to medicate cat.

Driving here was Interesting. I oversteeled my nervosity about driving down the sinister and labrythine Mass Ave at night, enough to make it most of the way over, but there's this bizarre vortex at Harvard Sqaure where signs suggest making a sharp left to stay on Mass/2A, and following their advice suddenly puts you on Mt. Auburn, heading in an unknown direction. ?!. Fortunately I had a decent map of Cambridge with me, and the street I slipped onto in order to better study it proved to be an even more direct route to the house. Yay.

Now I must do lots of THINGS.

August 2022

S M T W T F S
 123456
78910111213
14151617181920
21222324252627
28 293031   

Syndicate

RSS Atom

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jul. 9th, 2025 01:16 pm
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios