Maniacal Drivers Depend on the Time

Due to my large size, I've been driving to work every day.

The real reason why I drive is that sometimes I can't get a seat on the BART and it kills my feet and legs to stand for 40 minutes. I have lots of opinions about the really rude people who won't give up their seats to the pregnant lady on a subway train. Truthfully, most of the time folks would move when I asked, but there was an occasion when they would not. On that one occasion I sat on the floor, but it's pretty hard for me to get up off the floor these days, and if I stand the entire trip my feet will hurt all day long. And also pretty frequently I don't want to have to ask for a seat nor do I want to risk not getting one at this late stage. So I drive to avoid it all.

Lately, I've been going to bed around 8:30pm or so and getting up around 6am or sometimes earlier. It means I can be at work by 7:30am which has lots of cool side effects.

• The first one is that people don't drive like maniacs this early in the morning. There's still tons of traffic, but it's not jammed up yet, usually.
  
• The bridge isn't usually backed up yet, either. Or if it is, it's a small back up.
  
• There's tons of all day street parking near my work. (I used to have a parking spot in a lot, but our company recently decided to only pay for half of those parking permits. I think they thought we would just pay the other half of it ourselves, but lots of us just street park now and move our cars during the day. Oh, the struggles of becoming profitable.)
• I have hours to work without getting interrupted and asked questions. So, I actually get a lot done early in my day, before all the meetings typically start.
• I get to leave work early enough that businesses are still open, and there's many hours of daylight to do my walk. (I'm still walking about 3mls every day after work. It's getting harder and harder, but I'm trying to keep it up.)
  

The maniac driver thing is a very large, important thing for me. It really makes the difference between being slightly on edge and jumpy while driving to and from work and being pretty chill and relaxed.

When I drive later, say more towards 8 or 9am, you will have several experiences where people will change lanes without signaling into maybe 10 feet of empty space in front of you while the person who is already in front of you is braking. This situation will leave you maybe a couple feet behind them as they slam into your lane and brake hard. It's pretty scary, and annoying.

And it's only worst if you're the kind of mellow driver that I usually am where I leave space in front of me. Then you get these types diving in front of you the entire way to work. Or my favorite is those people who tail you more and more because you do leave that couple car length in front of you and get visibly frustrated when you let somebody in in front of you (which I usually do if they signal.) Like somehow you're making them personally late to get to work or something. It's pretty entertaining to watch and think about, but it's just so weird. If people were just a little nicer and mellower, all of traffic would move better.

I really am entertained by watching traffic. It's almost as interesting as going somewhere and watching a new culture (which I love!) I think I got more into traffic after reading this really surprising book about, well, traffic.

WFH

That's WFH (working from home) for those who don't know the vernacular.

We are permitted to wfh at my job. And I haven't really taken advantage of that very much before. But I'm starting to now. I've begun to see how glorious it is to skip the commute into work and the random interruptions of my concentration. And then there's the magic of having my cat nearby, either on my lap, on her special pillow next to my computer, or occasionally, on my keyboard. On the downside, I miss working in a group. And we've got a pretty great group at my work. Also, there's some coworkers who don't really work when they are wfh, so they give it a bad reputation. I'll be going in tomorrow, I need to have some discussions with folks that just won't cut it via IM.

I recently found out that I (probably) am going to India in February. I'm really excited to go there. It's been the place I've wanted to travel to for quite a while. The unfortunate thing is that after going to New Zealand, I don' t have much vacation to use. But I'm going to try my darndest to get at least a week off, after working there for two weeks.

Some updates for those who are wondering:
I'm no longer doing calorie restriction. We went to Houston and it was impossible to maintain while I was there. Then I never picked it back up again.

I still love my Roomba, though she hasn't gotten as much attention as she did when she was new to me.

Kitty Food and Natural Gas Cars

I just got my new car!
It's so exciting, I can't even describe it.

A friend of mine bought it brand new two years ago, and she's leasing it to me for the next year while they live in another country. The car is a 2005 Honda Civic that runs on natural gas. It can go about 200 miles on a full tank. Besides not using gas, I can also drive over the Bay Bridge without paying the $4 toll, and I can even drive in the car pool lane without having anybody else in the car. As somebody who commutes across that bridge everyday, and usually sits in the backed up traffic, this is pretty special. I'm really glad that I have the opportunity to check out this natural gas car. Maybe I'll go ahead and buy one myself in a year.

The other exciting thing about this car is that it's so new and nice inside. Ooooh La La. I've been driving beaters, or at least old cars, my entire life. For example, take my current car. It's a 1986 VW Jetta Diesel that has over 250,000 miles on it. Yes, that's a quarter of a million miles. Since I've moved to this area I've had 5 windows and 4 stereos stolen. Currently, I just have a hole where the stereo should be, and a bunch of wires hanging out.

We were driving to dinner tonight to celebrate and I was playing this great cd. I noticed that the music moved from one side of the car to the other, and I mentioned it to my honey pot. He made some comment about stereo music. I was listening to stereo music in my car with quality speakers!! How exciting! Yes, I've never had a car with stereo, or at least speakers good enough that you would notice such a thing. I'm so looking forward to rocking out with loud music in this car, my car for now. I'm going to sing at the top of my lungs.

The other exciting and mystifying thing that happened is that Stella seems to love her new food. She's a rather finicky cat, and we recently ran out of her cat food. The one she's been eating for 6 1/2 years. It's good food, made well, with good ingredients. That normally isn't such an issue because I would normally go out and get more. Not this time. The company discontinued making it. I immediately started envisioning my cat, near death, all waif like, refusing to eat because of her missing favorite cat food. Stella needed food, so I bought a random bag of other good food and worried about the future. But when I opened the bag, she seemed excited by it. So I put a scoop in her bowl next to what was left of her old food and went to work. When I got home, she had picked out the new food and left the old food cold and alone in the bowl. Stella seems to love the new food even better than the old! I'm so glad that this was a smooth transition. It could have been really difficult.

In other news, my honey pot and I leave in 14 days for Burning Man! I can't believe how little we've prepared so far. I have done nothing except realize last Sunday that I hadn't even thought about it. Usually by now my honey pot would be so into his projects that I wouldn't have seen him for 4 weeks already. But this is our year of no projects. I like it better this way. We'll be out there a little under 6 days. I was describing it to a co-worker and I felt myself begin to get really excited. It's been slow coming because of the large project we're in the midst of at work right now. I almost feel like I shouldn't be going because it'll be in the absolute worst time for this project. But I can't move this event. If I was going on a vacation that I could change the dates of, I probably would. But I can't. So it is what it is and I'm going.

Ode to the Bay Bridge

I am so glad that they fixed the I-580 ramp in the maze early. It was astounding how much and how far away it affected traffic. Usually I can leave work around 7pm and drive at least 50mph the entire way across the bay bridge and home. Also, I can usually leave home around 9am and drive without too much delay into the city. But since that accident happened, traffic has been all messed up hours later and earlier than normal. Essentially the detour through city streets with lights was backing up that traffic all the way across the bridge. The right 4 lanes would crawl and as a result people would move over into the left lanes and block those too. So that when traffic was finished crossing the bridge, it was this cluster f*&^ to merge back into the detour through Oakland. That was no fun. I guess the good news is that it encouraged me to ride the BART more. And riding BART with it's two significant walks on either end took just about as long as driving, but was much more peaceful. But now, it is again much faster to drive. I didn't even slow down coming home tonight. Party time!

In other news, I had my employee review today and it was really great. I mean, I think I would have been pretty shocked if they had said something like "Erica, you suck, and you're fired". But there was nothing negative and there wasn't even any suggestions for areas of improvement.
That's pretty cool.