Cold front

When I got in the car this morning, pre-dawn, the dashboard thermometer read 20° F. I’m pretty sure at the beginning of this week the daytime highs were around 60° F or so. Oh, Temperate Zone, how you toy with me. I would say this capacity for sub-zero weather is yet another difference between the South (where I live) and the Deep South (where some people think I live, just because my commonwealth seceded and for a while happened to encompass the Confederate capitol … geez, perspective, people) but there have been crop-threatening deep freezes in Florida this winter, so I’ll just stick with this: I really hate winter.


We’re supposed to get snow this weekend, but today it’s cold and clear. My drive in to the Metro station was also clear, which is at least marginally noteworthy to me because lately it’s been bumper-to-bumper from the moment I merge onto the highway from the ramp in my town. I don’t know if this morning just happened to be blessedly free of accidents and breakdowns, or if this is indicative of a pattern. It’s possible. Lots of people in this area work for the government and a lot of government agencies more or less mandate a compressed work schedule where every two weeks people get Friday off, because they work nine nine-hour days in that period instead of ten eight-hour days. Theoreticaly that would lighten the highway load on Fridays, assuming there isn’t rain or ice or glare or emergency roadwork. If I really cared I might try to pay attention and track the Fridays, but I suspect that despite talking about it right this second, I actually don’t care that much.

The really dispiriting thing, to my mind, is how unpredictable my driving commute seems to be. Some days there are longer delays than others but I’m never 100% sure why. The slowdowns happen in different places at different times for no apparent reason. Sometimes leaving the house ten minutes earlier or ten minutes later makes a big difference, and sometimes not.

Listening to the traffic reports on the news radio is, incredibly, even more maddening. Sometimes I will be at a standstill on I-66 and the announcer won’t mention that highway at all, but other times he will, and again, the circumstantial difference is utterly imperceptible to me. Not to mention the fact that more often than not the mention in the traffic report consists entirely of “I-66 eastbound experiencing delays” before moving on to the next bullet. Not terribly illuminating. Of course illumination may be overrated, since in my ignorance I can always hope the traffic will miraculously break up soon, whereas if the eye-in-the-sky tells me “delays continue all the way to Exit 70” then I just know I’m unpardonably screwed.

Of course, since I advocated perspective at the outset here, I should mention that a couple weeks ago I heard the morning traffic report refer to a tanker truck incident up on I-270 in Maryland. Said tanker truck being ON FIRE. That sucks in a lot of ways, and certainly made my stop-and-go progress toward the Metro seem like a burden I could reasonably bear.