An archive of my old LiveJournal
I drove the same ~8-mile stretch of freeway between home and work 6 times yesterday. Morning & evening commute. Met alenxa for lunch. Went back late at night to deal with a tech problem that couldn’t be resolved remotely. Which sucked, because I had to get up early for an allergist appointment. Yay coffee!
Fun fact: It took longer to drive the ~1 mile back from the restaurant to home after lunch than to drive the 8 miles back from work at midnight. Yay freeway!
Encountered the aftermath of a fairly major accident on the way to pick up alenxa after work. Someone had hit a traffic signal at Jamboree and Michelson and knocked it over. Police were investigating the shattered bits of one of those little equipment covers, as well as the pole, while what remained of the car sat halfway into the intersection. I hesitate to think how fast they must have been driving when they hit. Or, for that matter, what happened to whoever was in the car.
After I picked her up, I decided to take MacArthur to avoid all the spillover traffic. Driving over the freeway, we saw flames climbing up the wall of a sports club building from its sign, occasionally dropping to the ground to join another blaze at the base of the building.
A few minutes later, a fire engine zoomed by on the opposite side of the street. I pulled the car over to the side, and some numbskull decided instead of pulling over behind me and waiting for me to start moving again, they’d creep around me. As if I had pulled over to make a right turn, rather than pulling over because of the big red firetruck with flashing lights and a siren. WTF?
Last weekend I spent a lot of time reading on the balcony after things cooled off enough that outside was better, with the slight breeze, than the inside. I finished rereading A Wizard of Earthsea and The Tombs of Atuan, and started on The Farthest Shore.
Monday alenxa and I tried to run out to the local second-run theater and see Pirates 3 again, but they were sold out. None of the other movies looked interesting, so we spent an hour and a half in Barnes & Noble instead, then went for an early dinner at Ruby’s.
Even though it cooled off substantially Monday night, the apartment stayed warm, no matter how we arranged the fans. We seriously considered sleeping out on our balcony.
Tuesday I had the dubious honor of changing a tire in 85-degree heat, which was better than changing it in 100-degree heat on Monday would have been, but still not much fun. I took it to Costco, where they said they could repair it (it was an obvious puncture, with a 1/2″ bolt sticking out of the tire), but the tire was worn down far enough they wanted to replace it. I told them I was looking at replacing the car in a few months, so they stuck with the repair.
As it turned out, we ended up replacing the car this weekend.
Caltrans has been resurfacing the Ramp of Doom for the last few weeks. No major accidents there, though on the opposite ramp yesterday a moron tailgated me on a curve at 50 MPH while holding a cigarette in one hand and dialing a cell phone with the other (I think she must have been steering with wrist pressure alone).
Anyway, this morning… big accident at the Walnut entrance to Jamboree. Looked like an overturned (and backwards!) gardening truck. Several fire trucks, a ton of police cars, a couple of random cars that looked okay (maybe witnesses, or people who stopped to help). The ambulance was just leaving as we arrived. The ramp was completely blocked, so plan A was to continue to Harvard… along with everyone else. Harvard isn’t built for that much traffic. So, on up to Culver, over a block, and back down to Jamboree (after a 2 mile detour).
Then, after I’d dropped alenxa off, I got on the 405… and guess what? Another accident! I couldn’t quite tell what was there, since it was on the other side of the freeway, though the fire truck was on the near side at the center divider. Looked like at least 3 cars, maybe 4.
And of course a construction crew at the classic Ramp of Doom.
It was one of those mornings…
With no warning (or at least none that I noticed), the Ramp of Doom was closed this morning. This led to a line of cars dropping from ~50 MPH to about, let’s see, zero in a short distance, which I suspect isn’t particularly conducive to traffic safety, but never mind that for now.
Anyway, as I crept past the bridge, I looked up to see if some automobile carcass was blocking the ramp entirely. It turned out there were two bright orange construction trucks parked on the shoulder of the bridge, a couple of guys in orange vests and construction helmets, and what looked like plywood in roughly the spot of Wednesday’s accident.
Presumably they were repairing damage to the railing. Though it seems to me that the whole ramp could use some re-engineering.
The rain was intermittent this morning. It seemed to have cleared up by the time alenxa and I got up, but was sprinkling by the time we left for work. The first leg of the drive went from light rain to heavy downpour and back to light rain with large chunks of blue sky and even a couple of segments of rainbow.
The rain had mostly stopped by the time I dropped her off, so on the second leg of the drive I mainly had to deal with spray from the cars in front. When they were moving fast enough, anyway.
Had a bit of a shock at the now-infamous Ramp of Doom, though. There was a red pick-up truck, upside-down and backwards, pointed toward the edge and shoved up against the railing of the bridge. It was surrounded by two police cars and a bunch of traffic cones, with the police making observations. No sign of the driver, who I imagine wasn’t in the best shape, though there was a stopped car on the shoulder just before the ramp. The cab looked slightly crunched, but it’s possible the driver could have walked away. Maybe the other car was a friend or co-worker, coming to pick him/her up. Or he could have already been carried out by ambulance.
A light pole was knocked down, lying inside the curve of the ramp. It may have been there already, but I hadn’t noticed it before.
Three cars were stopped along the side of the bridge. No obvious damage.
A tow truck sat in the left lane, surrounded by traffic cones.
People stood around on the side of the road, talking on cell phones (presumably calling insurance agents, police, or more tow trucks).
Two SUVs were in the middle of the bridge, one facing forward with its right front wheel assembly ripped off. It was leaning forward, resting on that corner, debris scattered around it. The other was facing backward in the far left lane, aimed slightly toward the center divider. This is an odd pattern: SUVs facing backward in the left lane on that bridge. I think there must be something about their balance that makes them likely to start spinning when drivers take them out of the turn and try to merge left.
Although in this case, the tow truck driver was stopping traffic so that the backwards SUV could turn around. As the driver swung the car around, I saw a huge dent in the rear passenger side door. It became clear that, whatever led into the accident, the other SUV had rammed it, losing its own wheel for the trouble. Now that I think of it, this isn’t the first SUV I’ve seen lose that wheel on this ramp.
Monday night, as I parked the car in the “garage”, I noticed the light looked funny. Sure enough, one of the headlights had gone out. I didn’t have time to pick up a replacement bulb on Tuesday, so I grabbed one last night, picked up some work gloves that weren’t all covered with gardening dirt and plant bits, and called alenxa to ask whether we had any safety glasses since the bulb package had a warning about how it was pressurized and could explode in your face if handled incorrectly.
Now, you probably haven’t noticed this unless you’ve watched me turn into a driveway, but the front left turn signal is white instead of yellow. This is because when it burned out a year(?) ago, the store only had clear bulbs of the right type, and I had somehow gotten it into my head that the glass in the turn signal assembly was amber (it isn’t). I went with what I had, and checked back at the nearby auto parts store a week or so later to see if they’d gotten the amber bulbs in. Once I had them, I let them sit on my desk for a year because I didn’t feel like messing with it, and hey, the signal worked, didn’t it?
So I figured as long as I was replacing the headlight, I’d take care of the turn signal at the same time. Only one problem: I’d bought the wrong bulb. I needed 1157NA, and picked up 1156NA. The bulb was the right size, but it had the wrong number of filaments, the wrong number of contacts, and the pegs on the base were in the wrong spot.
So the car has a full set of headlights now, but the turn signal is still off-color.
Meh.
For a nice change of pace, I managed to get on the freeway about a half mile ahead of a traffic break this morning.
This meant I got halfway from alenxa’s office to mine at about 80, and the rest of the way at 50.
Much nicer than the day last week that averaged 15.
(This has been anoteer Useless FactTM)
Usual spot at the SB 405 – NB 133 interchange, just after the ramp on the 133’s bridge over the 405. Three cars, including a Jeep that looked OK from behind, a car in front of it that had completely flipped over, and another car in front of that one that I couldn’t see very clearly, because I was watching the guy standing out in front waving his hands to make sure people slowed down and didn’t plow into the scene. It had clearly just happened, since neither police nor ambulance had arrived.
At least I hope that’s why he was waving his hands. It certainly looked more like “Hey, watch out!” than “Please, stop and help!” Damn, I didn’t even think of that until just now.