An Open Letter to Bad Drivers

Dear Awful Driver (You Know Who You Are):

If you or your vehicle are unable to drive the speed limit, you shouldn't be allowed on the road during commuter hours except in a dire emergency. No, I'm not talking to you, drivers of buses and large trucks; I take no issue with you. I wouldn't want to drive something that large on back roads, either. Trucks and buses, however, are rarely a problem for me.

I left the house this morning in plenty of time to make my commute without needing to speed - but I still arrived more than ten minutes late. What happened? I got behind a series of idiotic, toad-licking morons to whom the concept of driving a car on a road seemed totally unfamiliar.

It was a clear, sunny morning. The roads were dry and there was no wind. So if the speed limit is 50 and you're doing 35, I have one question for you: WHY?! I don't understand.

Are you out for a Sunday drive (on a Wednesday...)? Then let those of us who actually need to get somewhere go by. Is your car broken? It shouldn't be on the road. Are you that scared of driving? You shouldn't have a driver's license.

I've grown accustomed over the summer to commuting on the interstate. I enjoy it because when I come up behind you doing 60 (in a 65) in the passing lane, I can usually get the point across that you need to move over. On the interstate, you're not much of a problem. On my back-roads commute to school, however, you are a huge problem.

Only one vehicle out of five this morning had an obvious reason to be going as slow as it was, and that was a pickup truck with two kayaks in the bed. You don't want to drop those kayaks, fine, I understand. But if you're doing significantly less than the speed limit, you should still pull over and let the tail of thirteen cars behind you go by. It's not our fault you can't tie your shit down properly.

Here's another problem I see all the time. You're terrified of cop cars. It really pisses me off to be driving along and have someone in front of me slam on their brakes just because they saw a cruiser somewhere. There are two things you don't realize. One, if you're going that much under the speed limit, a cop can actually pull you over for obstructing traffic. Two, cops look for brake lights when they're trying to catch speeders. You will more often get away with cruising merrily by a cop at speed limit + 5 than you will with slamming on your brakes and doing speed limit -1, because you drew attention to yourself with those bright red lights.

I'm also accustomed to getting stuck behind tractors and other farm equipment, living in the very rural area that I do. That doesn't bother me. The farmers need to go about their business just like the rest of us. However, just because you're crawling along behind a tractor doing 7 miles an hour in a 40 doesn't give you the right to pass if there's oncoming traffic.

One morning at the end of last semester I was headed north to school for a day of finals. There was no one in front of me, and I was approaching the bottom of a hill and the entrance to a curve. Needless to say, the line in the road was a double yellow, as there's no more than 30-40 feet of visibility into that curve. A tractor was on its way down the hill in the other lane, followed by a long line of cars. Suddenly the first car in the line veered out and came at me in my lane doing well over the speed limit.

My reflexes are good, and I barely avoided a head-on collision. When I passed the tractor, I caught sight of a couple of horrified faces in the other cars waiting for their chance to go around.

Now what would you have done, stupid driver, if you'd hit me? My first guess is that you would have yelled at me, because this is Massachusetts and that's what happens here. Dane Cook's line "Why did you stop at a red light and let me hit you doing 80?!" is not a joke in this state, it's everyday life. Anyway, I was doing about 45, so you were probably doing at least 55 to 60, meaning we would most likely have both ended up in the hospital. Was your destination so damn important that it was really worth it to risk seriously injuring or even killing us both to get there 30 seconds earlier? Do you realize that if you'd been killed, you wouldn't have made it to that destination at all? Could you be any more of a dickweed?

I'm not even going to get started right now on the topic of rotaries, because that's another letter in itself, to be written another time. So, Awful Driver, the next time you go out for a jaunt at 8am doing 15 under the speed limit, think about it. I'm sure it's nice not having anywhere to be, but that doesn't make it right or polite of you to rub it in the rest of our faces that we have to work for a living.

Sincerely,

KK, Who Needs to Be Somewhere

Winter Break Recap

I managed to finish out last semester with all A's, despite my worries about Software Engineering. When we got our grade reports in the middle of the semester, I wasn't doing so well - that class was nothing like I expected it to be, and I was expecting it to be much more interesting. Turned out there was no programming at all, just charts and graphs and enough theory to gag on.

Christmas was pretty quiet - on Christmas day, Craig and I went to his parents' house, and then to a movie with a couple of friends. The day after, we went up to mom's house and celebrated with her, and then to Marie and Dan's. For New Years', we went to the Monkey Bar in Amherst. We had a few drinks, hung out with the bartender when he got off shift, stayed until close, then went home and went to bed.

The rest of winter break has been split between drawing and doing web design. I'm in the messy middle of reconstructing Northeast2WayComm - every time I think I've got it figured out, Drupal throws me another curve ball. I will get it done, it's just a lot more frustrating than I expected.

School starts up again next week, on Tuesday, since Monday is MLK day. I'm signed up for Computer Math Foundations (I've got more than enough extra math classes that I should have been able to sub out of that one, but no such luck), UNIX, Database Project, American Revolution, and E-commerce. I've already started reading one of the books for the Revolution class, which is about Thomas Paine. I'm over halfway through it and am looking forward to finishing it before the class starts. The less I have to read during the semester, the better!

Tablet Art

I got the tablet I was hoping for on Christmas, and I've been spending a whole lot of time with it. Tonight's project was a self-portrait to use as an icon on websites.

TGIO 2009

TGIO...that's NaNo speak for Thank God It's Over. November, that is. I won again this year, barely. I dropped way behind in week three and had to play massive catchup on the last weekend. Here's my stats graph (in words per day):

Yeah, I made it. Yeah, it's a complete mess. The story's not done - I'm thinking the first draft will probably be around 80k - but I can't bring myself to go back and look at it. It veered so far off course so many times that I think it's going to take a baseball bat to get it to submit.

Still have a few homework assignments left, but the semester is almost over. Today is the last day of the penultimate week, and the week after next we have finals. I still have to do two more homeworks for Software Engineering, two more for Database Systems, a homework, a group project, and the final for Internet Programming, and a worksheet and the final for Economics.

Marie and Dan are coming down to the house this weekend (yay!). They're going to stay over Saturday night and we're all going to the S&W range on Sunday. Mm, cordite therapy...

Breakfast Bread

This stuff is amazing. It's super easy to make, doesn't take many ingredients, and is much tastier than it sounds from the recipe. It's really more like a cake made into a bread shape; somewhat like banana bread.

1 cup sugar

2 large eggs

3 tablespoons unsalted butter, room temperature

1 cup milk

1 1/2 cups all purpose flour

2 teaspoons baking powder

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1 teaspoon salt

Preheat oven to 350°F. Butter and flour 9x5-inch loaf pan. Using electric mixer, beat sugar, eggs and butter in large bowl until well blended. Beat in milk. Mix flour, baking powder, cinnamon and salt in medium bowl. Add to butter mixture and beat just until blended.

Pour batter into prepared pan. Bake until golden brown and tester inserted into center of bread comes out clean, about 1 hour. Transfer pan to rack and cool 10 minutes. Using small knife, cut around sides of pan to loosen bread. Turn bread out onto rack and cool completely. (Can be made 1 day ahead. Wrap in foil and store at room temperature.)

NaNo Recipes

It's that time again - NaNoWriMo! I'm two days behind, but not doing too badly. Of course, NaNo always means the conundrum of, "I want dessert, but I don't have time to make anything involved, like a pie." So I'm collecting quick recipes for good treats. Right now I've got a breakfast bread in the oven, but I won't post the recipe until I see how it comes out. Over the weekend, I made these:

Chocolate-Chocolate Chip Muffins

2 cups flour

3 tsps. baking powder

2 tbsps. sugar

3/4 tsp. salt

1 egg

3 tbsps. butter, melted

1 cup milk, warmed

2 tbsps. cocoa

1/2 cup chocolate chips

1 tsp. vanilla

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Combine the flour, baking powder, sugar, and salt in a large bowl. Melt the butter and add it to the warm milk. Stir the butter mixture and the egg into the dry ingredients and whisk until just blended. Add the cocoa, the chocolate chips, and the vanilla. Whisk until the cocoa is not entirely blended for a marbled look. Bake 20-25 minutes. Makes ~12 muffins.

Big Slick

The installing of camera systems went well, although we're not nearly done yet. There's a total of thirty-nine buses, and we're through ten of them. Friday was incredibly slow. Craig did a demo install in one bus so Ed and I could watch, then took off to Bristol, CT to do another job while we stayed in Watertown to work on the cameras. We got almost through two buses, finishing everything except for putting the actual recording box into the holder.

I asked the office if we could leave our tools in Bus 26, and they told me no, 26 was about to leave. So I moved everything to Bus 1, the next one on the list, then checked to make sure it wasn't going anywhere. Nope, every single bus was leaving in ten minutes.

No, wait, Bus 27 is staying - work on that one. So I told Ed to finish up 16 while I put our things in 27. But wait - 27 is actually leaving, but 1 is staying. I moved everything back into Bus 1, Ed finished 16, and we started tearing the panels off 1.

Oh, no, Bus 12 is broken, and we need Bus 1! We screwed everything back together, having accomplished nothing more than drilling a hole, then waited fifteen minutes for Bus 12 to return. Hey, at least we can work on that one, since it's broken.

Craig returned from Bristol just as Bus 12 was getting back. We moved everything into 12 and took down the panels. Uh oh - another bus is broken. We need to get 12 back on the road. Ed and I screwed 12 back together again, joking about how annoying it would be if they suddenly told us we could keep 12 after all.

Hey, guess what - the other bus is going to make it. You guys can keep 12! But we just put it back together...do we dare tear it apart again?

We waited for a bit, listening to the radio for anymore breakdown reports. I texted Craig to ask if he wanted us to do the bus or not, but he didn't reply, so finally I decided that we were going to go ahead and do it. Craig came back when we had the panels down (again), and we got all the wiring run, then packed up and left for the day, rather frustrated.

Saturday was much better, since most buses stay in the lot on weekends. I did five full installs by myself, and Craig and Ed did another five. (I'm not as fast as all that; they kept getting the buses that had all sorts of annoying quirks that required workarounds.) I never thought I would know as much about school buses as I do now. I even figured out how to hot-wire one by accident, as I was wiring in the side panel with the ignition on, and I crossed two terminals with a wrench and the bus flipped out and started honking. I've also learned where the fuse is for the damn alarm.

After getting out of the lot on Friday, we went to see Anne at the vet's office where she works in Meriden, because she said she had a cat that I needed to meet. When we got there, she was in an appointment with a client, so we hung out in the waiting room, all decked out in our stylish holy-shit-yellow safety vests. The girl behind the counter asked if we were there about the cats, and when I said yes, she showed me a picture on the counter.

Anne had said he was a Persian, but I got confused and was thinking of a Himalayan. My first impression of this cat was "Oh god, he's ugly!" I don't like the way Persians look anyway - I can't get over the squished-in faces - but these two had been shaved when they arrived at the vet because they were so matted. Well, their bodies had been shaved. Their heads, paws, and the tips of their tails were as furry as ever, and they looked ridiculous.

Pumpkin won us over, though. He may be the sweetest cat I have ever met. He was completely unfazed by the appearance of three dirty strangers in shiny vests, and in under a minute was purring madly and climbing all over us.

He came from a house with thirty-something cats. Apparently the owner was a breeder, but she died, and all the cats ended up at the vet. She didn't have the resources to properly care for all of them, although they were at least up to date on their shots and physicals. They lived in cages and didn't get to run around and play. Anne said that he had already developed a lot of muscle tone since he came in a month ago, but he still falls over when he plays because his back legs are weak. He's really clumsy, spontaneously falling off tables and chairs, but I suspect that when he's stronger and his whiskers have grown back on the left (somebody slipped with the clippers), he'll be a little more graceful.

The other cat who was there with him could have been his twin, although they weren't litter mates. Spice, however, was painfully shy and wanted nothing to do with us. Besides, we've got three female cats already, and neither of us want any more.

Pumpkin rode contentedly in the car for two hours. He's so accustomed to being in a cage that he walked right into the carrier on his own, then settled down and purred while I drove. When we got to Larry's house to drop off Ed, Pumpkin was curled up on Craig's lap, fast asleep and purring like crazy.

The girls aren't too fond of him yet. He seems disappointed when he goes over to say hello and gets hissed at in return, but I suspect they'll end up getting along. We have changed his name; Pumpkin just didn't seem appropriate. Meet Big Slick.