Running on fumes

Clearly I sprained my brain a little bit yesterday in my attempt to catalog all of the various series I am currently bouncing between in my regular reading rotation, because today I got pretty much nuthin'.

Of course, not helping matters may be the fact that the part of the country I call home is currently experiencing a semi-ridiculous heatwave. Yesterday the digital thermometer on my car's dashboard read 104 degrees. At 5 p.m. Clearly that must be due to some kind of poorly designed sensor that somehow, I don't know, combines the ambient air temperature with the surface heat of the engine block, but dang. Hot hot hot hot hot. And today's much the same, so I'm really not looking forward to this evening's commute.

On the other hand, I made a determination yesterday that should lend the drive home every night an extra sliver of tolerability. The absolute worst, most soul-crushing part of the entire drive comes near the beginning, after I leave the side streets around the Metro station and have to merge onto I-66, which is a nightmare of multiple feeder lanes both entering and exiting the highway in various directions. For the past six months I've dutifully been going out the way I come in, getting all the way into the left ramp lane as soon as possible, and sitting in a creeping, crawling line of cars making their way to 66.


On rare occasions, however, (usually because I'm running off-schedule for one reason or another) I have had to park in the garage on the opposite side of the station from the lot I normally use. This is a huge pain because it involves spiraling up (and down) several levels of the structure and feels like a huge waste of time, but the one bright spot is that because of the garage's position relative to the highway, the closest entry point to 66 is further along in the feeder-mess, which means when I leave via that route I am one of the jerks zipping up the righthand lane and merging into the main feed at the last second, instead of one of the schlubs in the left lane rolling bumper-to-bumper at 5 mph and trying not to let the jerks in.

So yesterday, even though I was running on time int he morning and parked in my usual lot, when I left I tried driving out in the opposite direction, past the garage, to get to the next highway entrance ramp. Which was an idea so crazy it just had to work! (It did.) My determination, then, is that I'm basically OK with being a right lane jerk every day, if it means I can avoid those suckiest ten minutes of the commute as a result.

Not the most exciting announcement ever, I know, but like I said, it's a slow news day in my brain today.