As a few offhand comments made in earlier posts (and no small amount of bitching on Twitter) alluded to, Lyssa and I have largely finished the task of relocating to a house in a small-ish neighborhood a stone's throw from downtown Washington, DC. We're not quite in the Sprawl anymore but you can definitely see signs of its encroachment if you walk a few blocks.

We'd lived for nearly six years in our apartment, a two-and-a-half bedroom deal that started to get pretty crowded a few years in (largely due to the fifteen bookcases split between Lyssa and I, but …

A few pictures taken from my car during the amazing (even for DC) traffic jam on the Beltway yesterday evening.

Cars, cars as far as the eye could see in triple-digit temperatures. Total driving time: three hours, three minutes. Distance from work to home: 32 miles

I don't know what this says about our world, but it's not good, this I know for cetain:

CREATIVE PEOPLE MUST BE STOPPED

Seen on the beltway as a bumper sticker this afternoon.

Only on the DC beltway can you be doing 70 in a 55 zone and have a little old blue-haired grandmother in a Thunderbird behind you hammering on her horn and pitching a conniption fit because you’re not going fast enough for her. The moment traffic opens up, that grandmother will stand on the gas pedal and burn past you like you were standing still, flagging you off as she did so. If you’re very fortunate she’ll hurl her $8us vaguely-coffee-flavored mixed beverage from Starbucks out of the driver’s side window at your windscreen in an …

A couple of weeks back I took my car in for 55,000 mile maintenance, during which it was discovered that the water pump was starting to leak, which necessitated a couple of extra hours of work on the part of the car dealership to replace. I figured that everything was hunky-dory with my car, and indeed for a couple of weeks it was.

Earlier tonight after getting off from a whiz-bang day at work, I noticed that the 'check engine' light had blinked on somewhen after I got on the Beltway headed south to go home. I didn't think …

Yesterday afternoon Lyssa and I struck out northward for New England to visit Jean, an old friend just over the Connecticut border. We loaded up the newly repaired TARDIS and headed for the Beltway around 1500 EST5EDT yesterday afternoon.

Now, seeing as how it was the day before Memorial Day weekend began, we should have realised how bad the traffic on the Beltway was going to be, but we'd figured that if we left early we'd beat the rush and not experience any undue delays.

This was not the case. The Beltway was a parking lot of people leaving work …