dragonlady7 | Nov. 21st, 2016

Nov. 21st, 2016

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Ugh 30mph white-knuckled terrible traffic in whiteout lake effect conditions for four hours between Utica and Batavia, but by the time I hit buffalo the streets were dry. I could sleep for a week if only the caffeine and adrenaline would wear off.

Crossposts: http://dragonlady7.livejournal.com/1589020.html

via http://ift.tt/2g8d5Uw:meanderings0ul replied to your photo “Ugh. Lake effect. (at I-90 New York State Thruway)”

I’m sure that’s terrifying to drive on, but what lovely scenery!

meanderings0ul

replied to your photo

“Ugh. Lake effect. (at I-90 New York State Thruway)”

I’m sure that’s terrifying to drive on, but what lovely scenery!

Oh, New York state is lovely, the scenery’s quite nice, though if you really want to see it, take the Amtrak train instead; the tracks run right along the banks of the Mohawk river and it’s just ravishing. The Thruway scenery’s normally not bad either. But today– ugh.

Goddamn hellacious fucking nightmare. I saw no fewer than eight cars spun out off the road, some impressively far off, and two or three minor accidents, including one pretty serious-looking rear-end collision in the spot by Canandaigua where the Thruway broadens out into three lanes each way, theoretically– there was enough accumulation that the lane markers weren’t visible so there was paradoxically only one lane the whole way, because nobody could fucking tell where the fucking road was, and everyone was just doing 30 mph wherever the fuck ever their spirit moved them to be, and clearly towards the end of it someone decided that their lane was just– where they happened to be, and someone else felt the same way, and they had a conflict of trying to occupy the same space at the same time at vastly differing rates of speed. Whammo! It had clearly happened at least a couple minutes beforehand, but not long enough that any kind of authority or person with their fucking lights on had come by, so they were just two dark cars sitting there and people standing in the median like assholes, and I was like good fucking luck my good buddy, I am not even going to rubberneck, I am just going to keep fucking driving because I do not want to be fucking dead.

The fucking Google app decided to pop up notifications on my phone saying ‘Traffic incident I-90 westbound’ every thirty fucking seconds, which was goddamn delightful.

Right around that point I found an 18-wheeler doing approximately the speed I felt I could handle, and I just tucked myself into its wake, and let it break trail, because if there weren’t tire tracks to follow the slush was impenetrable, but if I let nine wheels on each side go before me, I could just follow. But it meant i shadowed it including driving in its tracks whenever it changed lanes. (That, by the way, is how most people spin out in bad weather like this, so bear that in mind if you’re not used to driving in slush– if you MUST change lanes, do so at the mildest, slowest angle. take twenty minutes going from one lane to the other. Fucking drift over like a feather in the fucking breeze. DO NOT change lanes like the roads are dry. You will die. Changing lanes sucks. and the one you’re going into, that looks clear, probably has no tire tracks in it yet so it’s going to be a fucking disaster. If you’re not sure how to drive in the snow just get in the right lane and stay there no matter what. I’m telling you, barely even turn the wheel, you just have to coast into the other lane because your car’s not going to go where you point it if you try to point it at anything.)

I lost my mama duck truck in the last little clusterfuck of stopped traffic before the weather abruptly cleared at Batavia, but in the hour or so I spent tucked up behind it, I wished many blessings upon its driver. Those things have so much power and momentum, as long as the driver’s not a total fucking idiot they’re not going to have any trouble in the snow. (Unless some other driver is an idiot to them. Christ, people are fucking stupid. Semis take like half a mile to stop, do not cut them off. Jesus.)

I got a photo during one of the stopped-traffic moments. This is the best photo I’ve ever taken.

[removed: blurry photo of taillights through an icy windshield, tumblr won’t post this post if i include it. you’re really not missing anything.]

That’s my mama duck semi on the left. See how clear those ruts are for me to follow! It was great. I got a tiny fragment of an idea of a space freighter pilot doing the same for an inexperienced young courier pilot Shara, but I’d have to ponder the idea a bit more before anything came of it. I have no idea if this trucker really noticed me, though.

I was so exhausted at that point that– well, I cried with exhaustion and frustration as I was cleaning off my car, before I even got into it, because I have spent basically the last four days working every waking minute and I just wanted to be done and knew I had 300 miles to drive in iffy weather. So by the time I hit exit 45 and got behind this semi, I’d cried like twenty times in utter despair of ever seeing my own bed again. (I particularly remember bursting into tears at the Montezuma bird refuge place because I know that’s right by the sign that says 130 miles to Buffalo, and 130 miles is a really fucking long distance.) So I don’t know what I did, I just know that I was really really really really grateful that that truck’s wheels were doing such a good job at squashing the slush out of my way, because I didn’t see a plow from exit 34 onward.

(My earlier photo, Utica, was at the gas station rest stop right before exit 31, and it got real shitty immediately after I got back on the highway.)

(I almost pulled over at exit 46 to call Dude to find out if it was snowing all the way to Buffalo because if it was I was going to get off and go to my BFF’s house in Rochester and fuck getting to work tomorrow morning and fuck everything entirely. I’m glad I didn’t, though, because Buffalo got zero snow.)

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“

Companies like Google and Facebook have 67 days to minimize their data collection and retention before Trump is sworn in. That’s 67 days during which they can take a hard, close look at how much of their data they actually need to do their jobs, and how much they’re storing because hard drives are cheap and someone might have a cool idea down the line somewhere.

Dutch governments used their registers to record the homes of ethnic minorities in its border; these files could have been used by the Nazis to figure out which doors to break down. That’s why, on 27 March 1943, the Dutch resistance set fire to the municipal records hall, why the firefighters who responded made sure that they kept watering the building long after the fire was out, destroying any records that survived.

”
- The surveillance economy has 67 days to disarm before Trump is sworn in / Boing Boing (via stml)

via http://ift.tt/2fUveG1:danceswchopstck replied to your post “meanderings0ul replied to your photo “Ugh. Lake effect. (at I-90 New…”

I’m so glad you made it home OK! If it’s that bad again, saying “fuck everything” and stopping somewhere sounds good to me. I have a friend who drove to get to work on too little sleep, a some years ago, and she wasn’t so lucky. She’s still alive and kicking, but she’s been doing it on one leg ever since, and we nearly lost her completely. So, please continue to take care, as much as you can! I like you being alive in the world with all your parts!

aw, thanks. That’s nice of you to say!

i couldn’t stop anywhere, though, because I had to be where i am right now, at my other job, at 9am sharp this morning, because the Black Friday sales have kicked in and now I have to be back full-time at this position. I very much did not want to have to make the drive at that time, but I also could not have left the farm any earlier, because I was needed for the turkey packaging, which we finished with at 1pm. I took an hour to eat lunch and load my car.

Also I don’t know anyone in Central NY anymore, so I’d be driving around unfamiliar towns with no particular destination in a whiteout blizzard.

And the lake effect warning, as it proclaimed on the LED boards all along the highway, was in effect until 7pm Monday. So once I found a spot to be in that whiteout blizzard in an unfamiliar town, I’d be trapped there, potentially, for a full day.

So… I sort of wish I’d stayed behind at the farm, but their power was out and the snow wasn’t expected to stop, so if I hadn’t left when I did, I might have gotten stuck there.

I really didn’t see any option to not push through. I have friends in Rochester, but the lake effect band ended ten minutes past their Thruway exit, and so I’d’ve been struggling through the snowy local highways to their house, which would have put me in far more danger than just continuing to the clear roads to the west.

If I were sleepy, I’d’ve pulled over at a rest stop; I’ve done that before, and 15-20 minutes makes a huge difference. But I was just exhausted, whole-body exhausted, which isn’t exactly the same thing. A 20-minute doze in that case is only going to make the muscle tension worse.

I’m a disaster today, and all the coffee in the world isn’t going to fix it, but I am also wearing a deeply unflattering but beautifully-made hand-knit sweater my mother made me, so that helps in its small way. I forgot to bring any ibuprofen though. This has been A Week.

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#latergram of Stephanie and Rebecca’s hands after turkey slaughter– both young women, the wrinkles were because their hands were all pruney from eviscerating. You have to spend so long with your hands inside each carcass!

Crossposts: http://dragonlady7.livejournal.com/1589421.html

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thebyrchentwigges:

Once upon a time, there were some benevolent years called the early 90s. Oversized white t-shirts were sexy, everybody ate carbs, and friends wrote and mailed long letters. And it was during the 90s that I went on an all-women geology field trip.

We were on the road for four days. Seven women students, one woman professor, one woman TA, a van, and the rolling early-autumn hills of the Poconos in northern Pennsylvania. It was as positive and harmonious as could be. I had a mild, agreeable crush on someone in the van. I believe there were s’mores. The Lumberjanes Do A Science.

On one of the middle days of our trip, we drive up one of the worn-down, tree-draped mountains. The forest’s greenery is just starting to be touched with yellow and brown. We were going to climb a fire watch station and get a look at the geography. Our van pulls up to this site: there’s a cabin, maybe two, and the fire watch tower. A dog lollops out to greet us. The dog is wearing a bandana. The fire watch tower’s human emerges, a lanky man. He says nothing in greeting.

Instead, he begins to juggle.

We fall out of our van, entranced. He raises the stakes by balancing himself on some kind of teeter-totter. When he lets the balls drop, he tells us that we are welcome. That we can climb the fire tower. And that we are also welcome to play with his circus equipment.

We spend an idyllic half hour trying out juggling clubs, balls, balance beams, and hula hoops. Oh, and climbing the tower, taking in the roll of the land beneath its blanket of temperate rainforest. The land and the circus toys and the bandana dog all seemed part of the same benevolent magic.

I don’t remember how we left - looking back, I wonder why we left. But we did.

via http://ift.tt/2fz9HSt:
Heh, well. I hope no hurricanes got you too badly, then! (Did I correspond with you about Matthew? I must have done, it sounds familiar.)

If we shut down when there was snow we’d literally never get anything done. When I was in college, in Rochester, there was one semester where I had Fridays off, and I told myself I’d do some non-urgent errand that required driving, one of these Friday afternoons, but since it wasn’t urgent, I’d wait until a Friday when it wasn’t snowing or sleeting.

I waited for over two months before I finally went and took care of the no longer non-urgent errand– in a blizzard.

d’oh i meant to answer that privately but now i can’t figure out how, so, y’all get to read my wittering on about weather. lol.

Crossposts: http://dragonlady7.livejournal.com/1589554.html

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While I’m answering asks I should answer this one too. I am actually working on this but I decided I had to do another thing in the middle. But this is totally going to happen.

And speaking of being awkward at social interactions, I dunno, I totally have you at least tied, if not beat, by my entire existence, LOL. I’m super terrible at this kind of shit.

I think this ficlet is going to involve Finn going with Poe’s study group to watch Poe’s band play, somewhere. I think that’s what’s going to happen. It may take a while, though, so I figured I’d answer the ask in the meantime.

If Rey comes along, her notebook will definitely feature.