Note: I found this in my “drafts” folder today. I’m assuming that it’s from somewhere in 2015, when I was dating Amy from Waukegan.
Monday was driving day. The return to Atlanta from Waukegan. It began at about 4:30 AM – and I should’ve just stayed in bed.
Remember when truck drivers were among the best drivers on the road? Yeah, well, they’re not anymore. I started to notice this probably 10 years ago, and it just seems to be getting worse with time. With that in mind, it shouldn’t have come as a surprise to me that I came to a less-than-screeching halt 90 minutes after I set out on my trip Monday morning. Feeling good about things after making it through downtown Chicago without any significant slowdowns, I found myself basically sitting still on I-94, in the rain, for the better part of two hours – caught in the backup created by three trucks that had somehow managed to tangle with each other on I-80, some 5 miles down the road from me.
After finally getting past the scene of the accident, I spent the next 13 hours in basically non-stop rain, fog, and the mist kicked up by trucks whose drivers insisted upon driving next to other trucks, blocking both lanes and throwing up walls of water behind them. I got a bit of a break just south of Nashville, when the rain stopped and, briefly, the sun came out. By the time I approached the mountains north of Chattanooga, however, Mother Nature had thrown down the gauntlet. The rain increased steadily for the remainder of the trip, which ended at around 8:00 Monday night. By then, my neck and shoulders were in agony from the hunched-forward attitude that I’d been holding in the car for the majority of the day. It’s now two days later, and I could still use a massage.
I did make it home, however – managed to take just over 5600 pictures during the trip (the GoPro was set to snap one every 10 seconds) – and yesterday was back to the grind. It’s amazing how I can miss two days of work (three if you count the few people who go in to waste time on Saturdays) and end up with over 400 emails to go through upon my return. I spent a couple of hours trying to pay attention to them yesterday before figuratively throwing up my hands and deleting the whole lot of them. Probably not the most prudent thing to do, but I just wasn’t in the mood to deal with it anymore. If there was anything in there that was actually worth reading, I’m sure it will be resent about 40 more times before I need to actually pay attention.
Spent the rest of the day dealing with obstinate workstations and working on some new code ideas.
After work, I went to a brass band rehearsal – which was nice.
There were no truck drivers there.
TWD