After things slowed down a bit at work over the summer, I finally took some advice given to me by a number of people in various capacities and took a vacation. When your boss orders you to take a couple of weeks off because he's afraid that you'll spontaneously combust, it's kind of hard to argue the point. So, I put in for almost a month off, rented a car (because my family wanted to retain the option to travel as necessary), and scouted out someplace suitably far away in the mountains for as long as I could afford (which …
While Jason and I were driving cross-country late last year, we tried to clear two states a day to make sure that we'd get to the west coast on time. This usually meant setting out at 1000 hours local time, loading our luggage into the TARDIS, and putting the pedal to the metal. This usually wan't too big a deal because we usually started a day's travel from a half to a third of the way across a given state to begin with. Near the end of our journey, however, the only viable route meant clearing the state of Arizona …
On our way across the country, Jason and I passed through and stopped at a number of interesting places. One of the states we drove through was Oklahoma, which I have fond memories of from when I was a youngster (okay, okay, it's because I fell in love with rattlesnake while I was there). Anyway, I took some photographs while passing through - here they are.
There's just something about wide-open spaces, especially deserts, that call to me. I don't know what it is or why, only that it feels like home. It's why I love visiting places like Oklahoma, Arizona …
The DC metroplex is the only place I've seen to date in which the following sequence of events can occur within sixty seconds:
A woman with a handicapped parking tag in the rear window of her Volkswagon Beetle (new school) pulls into a handicapped parking space outside of a small deli.
A young man driving a Corvette slams to a halt directly behind the Volkswagon approximately four seconds after the woman shuts her engine off.
The young man in the Corvette (sans handicapped tag or license plate) begins to hammer on his horn with the vigor of a bandolier of …
If you haven't heard by now, the National Weather Service has predicted another blizzard headed for the DC metroplex, this time with up to twenty inches of snow in store for us. Yesterday afternoon the federal government called another code red, meaning that all non-essential personnel weren't supposed to drive in. Of course, in our infinite wisdom, Lyssa and I called up Hasufin (who owns a four wheel drive SUV) because we had to make a run to the supermarket to get a few things that we'd run out of (the stuff that spoils soon after you get it). Wholly …
After work last night, the roads of DC were harrowing, to say the least. Lyssa remarked that there would be a goodly amount of asshattery afoot, but I had no idea of just how right she was.. first of all, while driving Lyssa to dance class last night we came upon an unusual sight for northern Virginia: A white Pontiac at perpendicular angles to the rest of the road. The driver had somehow managed to get the front end of his car stuck in the ditch running alongside the road (they're a bit more common than you might expect for …
The good news is that Lyssa is all right; as I alluded to yesterday, she's been in a considerable amount of pain over the past couple of days. Rialian was nice enough to drive her to the doctor's office yesterday afternoon and it's been determined that she might have temporomandibular joint dysfunction. We're working on getting her to a dentist who specialises in such things to find out for certain, and thus set a course of treatment. She now has a prescription for painkillers that can actually cut the pain caused when the trigeminal nerve, which carries a large amount …
It snowed pretty much all night last night. I made the mistake of going out again for some last minute groceries, a jaunt down the block that wound up taking a solid hour, most of which was occupied by my trying to nagivate the TARDIS safely over frozen roads with no traction whatsover, and horrible visibility due to the huge snowflakes and Virginia drivers who think that high beams are perfectly acceptible to use in an environment filled with highly reflective particles. I got home and stayed home.
Last night Lyssa and I watched the first half of the second …
