An archive of my old LiveJournal
The sun is shining for the first time in over a week, and the gardeners at our apartment complex are out in force, almost as if they were on call, waiting for a chance for it to be dry enough to work.
It’s always amazing how green the hills are after rains like this, and it always seems unbelievable that they’ll be golden brown again by summer.
Rain should not fall at an angle more horizontal than vertical.
Whoever came up with the idea for a warning chime to let you know your headlights are still on is a genius, and has saved my car battery many times over.
It doesn’t take much rain to screw up freeway visibility. I could swear I’ve driven in heavier rain and been able to see better.
Our apartment complex suffers from the same problem as UCI: no one bothered to build in decent drainage. Fortunately that’s only been a problem with the sidewalks so far, and not, say, parking or storage.
What the heck is “white whole wheat” flour? It sounds like raw Twinkies, or wild tofu, or Sweet ’n’ Bland. Is it a 50/50 blend or something?
If you run a Persian restaurant, and advertise belly dancers, no one really cares whether the dances are authentic. On that note, Caspian is very loud, at least on Saturday nights. But the food’s good.
The web is a stranger place than you think. Yesterday I was looking at website referrer stats, and discovered a link to our Comic Con photos on a site that specializes in super-heroine, uh, “fantasies.” I.e. dressing models up as superheroines and then, shall we say, reversing the process. Apparently with rope often involved, though that’s almost classic if you’ve seen any 1940s-era Wonder Woman. They had a page full of links to people’s convention photos, focusing on cosplayers.
Just how do they fit Christmas lights into the box? I’d rather let the cord tangle up and then untangle it next year than go through the exercise in frustration that involves trying to get them all into the plastic framework, only to have them pop out, not fit in the box, etc. At least when you untangle them to put them up, you get something out of it: pretty lights on the tree (or window, or roofline, etc.) All you get from carefully placing each light in the frame is a box you’re going to put away and ignore for 11 months, and you can get that much more easily just by jamming the string of lights into the box in the first place.
I’ve been driving the same route to work for about two years, finishing with a transfer from one freeway to another and then to the first exit. The transition ramp is a cloverleaf up onto a bridge. Aside from an incident in which I was nearly clipped by a maniac in a Mercedes who insisted on climbing into my trunk on the off-ramp and zoomed past me the moment it reached the second freeway, I’ve never encountered anything worse than merging traffic.
In the past month I’ve seen three accidents—or, more precisely, one accident and two aftermaths.
First was an SUV that I watched slowly make a U-turn and crash into the center divider. (I have no idea how much control the driver had over the car at the time, but I swear I saw the wheel fall off when it hit.) Then last week there was the aftermath of a multi-car pileup on the side of the road. With the rain yesterday, I deliberately avoided the ramp and took the previous exit and surface streets. I was driving on automatic pilot today, so I took the ramp, and there was a car on the right shoulder and another SUV parked backwards, its right front wheel crunched into the center divider—in almost exactly the same spot as the one I saw a month ago.
Edit: I just wasted 10 minutes to bring you this *ahem* high-tech diagram:
