Oh dear lord. People, I got a parking ticket today. While parked IN FRONT OF MY HOUSE. Yes, it’s only a $20 ticket, but it was IN FRONT OF MY HOUSE. I apparently violated the law by parking with the driver’s side up against the curb, rather than the passenger side. Apparently this is a law because it means I was driving on the wrong side of the road. Except, hello, there are no lines on my street. People drive all over the damn street. You drive wherever there isn’t a car. And my house is right inside the turnoff from the main road, so I swing around the turn and into my spot IN FRONT OF MY HOUSE. Yes, it’s a public street, but I was IN FRONT OF MY HOUSE! This is insane. Furthermore, I’m not the only one who does it, but my rear bumper is visible from the main road, so…I’m the lucky one. Even though I was IN FRONT OF MY HOUSE for crying out loud!!!

Argh…apparently the DC Motor Vehicles people didn’t get my mail adjudication request in time. Or rather, perhaps they did get it, but didn’t get off their duff and open it in time. So I am now the bearer of a shiny new ticket, this time for $150. This was for the “red light violation” ticket I got, which was actually invalid because I was making a legal right turn on red. But they didn’t see my explanation, apparently - because surely requesting adjudication puts your “30 days till increased fine” on hold, right? So now I have to march my butt down to 301 C Street NW on Monday and tell them to find my damn adjudication request. I know I mailed it in time. Barely, but in time. Blargh.

Also, Firefox has decided to upchuck all over everything. It started with Tab Mix Plus not working all of a sudden, and then when I tried to reinstall it, it wouldn’t acknowledge that I had restarted multiple times already. So I’m now using Firefox 3 RC2, which is compatible with basically none of my favorite extensions. Ah well.

The main artery into DC from where I live is HOV-2 only until 9am. Not just a lane, the whole road. So if you’re timing your commute to get to the HOV starting point right at 9:00, but traffic is lighter than normal, you get there a little early. Usually people pull over a few feet before the line, and just wait until it’s 9:00 on the dot before continuing. I got there at 8:53 this morning, so I went to pull over behind three other cars stacked up waiting. Before I got onto the shoulder, a police car came up behind me with his lights on. Startled, I stopped in the rightmost lane and he pulled up next to me. He said, “you weren’t planning to pull over here, were you? Because it’s illegal.” Apparently it’s illegal to stop there: “improper stopping on a highway.” I had no idea! He waved at me to keep going, then parked and got out of his car to talk to the other three drivers.

So I kept going, but for the next 7 minutes I worried - hey, now I’m driving in HOV-only lanes. What if I get pulled over? I was trying to obey the HOV laws by waiting. Is it fair to penalize somebody for traffic being too light that day? You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t, as far as I can tell.

It is now 1:15am. I am finally back in bed. I had some…adventures. Much getting-lost and going-crazy ensued. Read the rest of this entry »

Well, that was fun. We were running errands around town, and everything was going fine. We stopped at one place and both of us went in, and then when we got back in the car it balked at starting but finally relented.

At the next stop, only A had to go in, so I stayed in the car and left it running. After a while I thought “it’s not too hot, I shouldn’t let it idle,” and I turned it off. When A came back out, I went to start it…and got nothing. We called AAA and got an estimate of 90 minutes, so we put up the sunshade and waited. I got the idea to try the engine again, and it tried to start. So a little while later I tried again - and it started!

We drove to A’s parents’ house and unloaded some stuff - without turning off the car - and then I drove to Saturn while A followed in her parents’ car. Mine won’t be seen until Monday morning, unfortunately, but this time they better replace the starter.

MP3 Phone Post (362k, 1m41s)

This absolutely, totally sucks. When I leave work, I can either jump onto Route 1 real quick, or I can take I-95. Now, normally I take 95, because I’m going home and it makes more sense to go that way. But today I have to drive to Baltimore, and for some reason I still took 95. So I have wasted about an hour by making that mistake. I am still sitting on the Beltway, trying to get to the Wilson Bridge, and it sucks a LOT. I left work about 45 minutes early because I wanted to get going and get to this event that I’m doing this weekend, and I can’t believe I did this. It would have saved me SO much time to take Route 1, and this is just ridiculous that traffic is this bad. Welcome to the DC area, folks. Because very few places have traffic this bad that you can get stuck for so long in such a short span of miles - FOR NO REASON. It’s not that there’s an accident, it’s not that there’s, I don’t know, a speed trap or something, no - it’s just normal that you’re totally stuck and it just sucks so bad. And it’s my fault, I’m the one who went the wrong way, but I did want to get going and I managed to completely waste about an hour. I’m not even up to Route 1 yet. So I completely wasted a bunch of time, and I figured what else should I do but make a Phone Post? So there it is. Take care, kids. Bye.

I learned something last night: I cannot drive in New York City. Specificially, I cannot park a car in Manhattan. We had parked for the week on a street with a school, so the signs said “No Parking 8am-6pm School Days.” The kids have been on vacation all week, but this morning they returned to school so we had to repark the car last night. I agreed to do it, and I set off in the dark and rain to attempt to park the car. To summarize: it didn’t work. I was scared of the cabs that kept getting beside and in front of me, I couldn’t keep track of one-way streets, people kept wanting to walk in front of me, I couldn’t figure out where to find actual valid parking, and - worst of all - I couldn’t defog the windshield except for a tiny halo around the bottom. If I hadn’t been so frazzled by the rest of it, I would probably have figured out that the air system was actually pointing at my feet and not at the windshield at all. But everything all put together left me rather freaked out, and I had to park in front of a fire hydrant in front of C’s building and run upstairs to say “I can’t do this! Come help me!” (I’d left my cell phone with my purse, which I hadn’t brought with me.) I think that if it had been daytime I might have been okay, and if it hadn’t been raining I probably would have been fine. But that combined with the usual hazards of city driving just pushed me over the edge, so I’m not keen to try it again anytime soon. The only thing I do trust myself to do is retrieve the car and park it in front of the building for loading purposes…anything else would scare me.

First of all, I sincerely appreciate all of the comments and e-mails I have gotten! It’s nice to hear so many people express concern. I made it through the interpreting gig without any major incidents; I had a nice chair (but high, like a stool) to sit on and I managed to keep going even though it was two hours longer than I was expecting.

We are presently at perigee and misia’s house; Peri’s dad seems really cool (this is the first time I’ve met him). We are spending the night here, but I think tomorrow we will go to either urgent care or the emergency room - both are operated by Inova. What I am mostly concerned about is what will happen on Monday…how am I going to get to work? Public transportation to my office building is really horrible, and it’s a long drive so I can’t ask anybody to drop me off and pick me up. And while I can drive short distances (a couple of miles) with my left foot, that won’t work for the entire trip to Fort Belvoir and back. So, yeah, I’m not sure what I’m going to do about work. Gah.

Well, I made myself late for work, but I was a good samaritan. Someone had struck a deer on Route 50 just before Prosperity, and it was dying in the right lane as people just drove around it. I pulled over and called 911, and within about three minutes there was an officer on the scene. I said “it’s still alive” and she said “yeah, we’re gonna have to put it down.” She made me get behind my car and she looked at the deer for a couple of seconds before getting out her service weapon and shooting it. She took it by the hind legs and pulled it off the road, but it wasn’t dead so she had to shoot it again. I got back into my car and she got back into hers and pulled over on the median in front of me. I was going to just go, but she got out and walked back to me. She asked if I was the one who had struck it (no), and if I had seen who did (also no). She said she would help me get back into traffic (people were driving by to my right), and she stopped both lanes and let me get back on the road.

If you want to hear about the gore, click here to translate the following. I’m sharing this because I saw it, and I have to record it for myself, but it’s graphic so I’m encoding it. If you want to mention this section in your comment, please encode it at the same link.
Jura V svefg fnj gur qrre, vg ybbxrq qrnq. V chyyrq bire naljnl. Naq gura V fnj gung vg jnfa’g qrnq, vg jnf dhvgr nyvir, ohg greevoyl vawherq. Vgf gnvy jnf n srj lneqf njnl naq vgf gnvyobar jnf ivfvoyr. Vg jnf n lbhat znyr jvgu whfg bar irel fznyy nagyre. V jngpurq va ubeebe naq qvfznl nf vg gevrq ercrngrqyl gb trg hc. Vg tbg vgf srrg haqre vg n srj gvzrf, naq bapr vg rira tbg n srj vapurf bss gur tebhaq, ohg vg pbyyncfrq ntnva. Gurer jnf n ybg bs oybbq ba gur ebnq, naq zber pbzvat sebz vgf zbhgu. V pna’g rzcunfvmr rabhtu gung guvf qrre jnf NYVIR. V ubcr vg jnf va fubpx ng yrnfg fb vg jnfa’g va cnva. Jura gur bssvpre fubg vg gur svefg gvzr, vg gjvgpurq n ovg, naq nf fur qenttrq vg bss gur ebnq vg sybccrq nebhaq - jr obgu xarj vg jnfa’g qrnq. Fur jngpurq vg sbe n srj zber frpbaqf orsber gnxvat nvz ntnva. Gur thafubgf fbhaqrq yvxr sverpenpxref - whfg bar ybhq ONAT naq gung jnf vg. Nsgre gur frpbaq fubg, gur qrre sybccrq n pbhcyr bs gvzrf naq gura jrag vagb greevoyr pbaihyfvbaf sbe n srj frpbaqf zber.

As I approached work, I heard a traffic report: “Route 50 and Prosperity, a report of an accident a short time ago.”

Goodnight, Bambi. Sleep well.

Note: I took a couple of snapshots. Here is the deer alone on the road, and here just before she shot it. (The glare in the second one is the sun, not the gunshot!) These pictures are not gory, but they might not be for sensitive readers.

Thanks to everyone who wished me luck getting home yesterday! I was sitting around waiting for AAA when I noticed a police car pull onto the shoulder ahead of me and back up until he was right in front of me. We each got out and I pointed to my tire and explained that I was waiting for AAA - “they should be here by 7:00.” He said that was way too long to wait, and he would call Motorist Assistance for me. (I think this is the first time I haven’t cried at a member of law enforcement!) I suspect he was more concerned with me not getting rammed by somebody else and dying than he was with me getting home at a reasonable hour, but that’s okay - he called, and a truck was there within five or ten minutes. The repair guy put my spare on, gave me a Motorist Assistance Packet with travel information, and told me I could call #77 the next time to get help. I’d forgotten that was even an option.

So I was on my way again by 6:30, and I went to Petco to feed the kitties. This is my part to help the animals in Hurricane Katrina - the normal Tuesday night volunteer is in Louisiana helping there, so I’m helping by taking over at Petco for her on a temporary basis. (I guess I never did actually mention that I was volunteering for 4Paws - I’m just a substitute for now because no weekly gigs were open that I was interested in.) The cats at my store now are Lady and Annie and I want to take both of them home. Annie is feisty and playful, and Lady is docile and gentle; they are both such wonderful cats that it really hurts that I can’t take them home. All of the 4Paws kitties are safe, though - it’s the kitties in Louisiana that really broke my heart as I as looking at PetFinder.com’s disaster section. (I don’t want to dig up the link again because it will just make me cry again.)