drive safe, drive humble

It started with a simple plan to go to work on Sunday morning and help with the project. It ended by being what I hope will be the most miserable driving adventure of my year.

Snow, the first of the winter for us, was falling heavily from the sky by around 2 p.m. and my boss said we should head home before we got stuck at the office.

Whatever, I thought. It’s just a little snow.

Scraped the snow off my car so I could see enough to drive and set out. After only a couple of miles on Route 7, I realized being stuck anywhere that day was a legitimate concern. The cars were controlled by drivers who think ridding the breaks is the easiest way to navigate icy roads. The caterpillar of traffic slowly slid east, mile-by-mile. Some parts of the caterpillar ended up on the shoulders. I was ten miles down the road an hour later.

During the second hour, while passing through Tysons Corner, I figured out how to entertain myself and keep my mind from nature’s call by slamming on my breaks and slidding a bit to freak out drivers around me.
Getting further east by taking access roads as much as possible was also fun.

Just before I got onto Route 66, I decided nature could wait no longer. Access road to gas station took me up a hill and then back down again and into a curb as I tried to stop my car from sliding into two cars stuck at the stop sign down there.

"Did I hit you sir?" I asked the driver of the car in front of me. "No, but you will if you go anywhere because we can’t move," he said.

I put the parking breaks on my car and ran to the gas station. "Bathroom is out back," the man told me. Opened door and closed it quickly after seeing man. Ran back to rescue my car so I could drive away quickly. "I’m from Idaho," I told the men blocking the intersection. "If you point your tire down the hill away from the curb, you should be able to make it down. Don't use your breaks a lot. I’ll stop the traffic for you."

Feeling good about telling two grown men how to drive on ice, I stopped one more time on my way 3-hour-drive home to help an elderly lady too. And the next morning, I stopped in the middle of a Reston intersection down the road from my office to help push another lady’s car up an icy hill.

And that’s where I locked my keys, my cell phone and my hot coffee in my running car.

"We don’t do that anymore," an officer at the nearby police station told me after I breathlessly explained what happened and asked them to unlock my car. Instead, I got a towing company’s number.

Towing company said they would take an hour so I ran the other direction to my office and got a hanger and snuck out before anyone could see me. Needless to say, people honked angrily and looked at me like I was crazy as I ran into the intersection to my car with wires, string and a pair of scissors in my hand. I’m not sure why I grabbed the scissors.

Here I have to thank Kristin, who locked my keys in my car once and determinedly led us through a successful hour-long exercise on how to break into it.

By the time I got to my office, my ego was deflated and I was glad to be at my desk and not showing off on the roads.

driving through my mind

Ironically, since I’m moving to cut down the commute, the thought of a shorter drive to work scared me this week after I realized my deepest thinking, biggest decisions, and my praying happens behind my steering wheel.

Vaguely aware of bumpers, traffic accidents, red light, green lights and tolls, I drive, not exploring Northern Virginia roads, but navigating through my most inner thoughts.

This hit me as I was driving on Baron Cameron.

I’m driving, I’m thinking. That’s just how it is. And on my drive to work, Baron Cameron is one of my best thinking stretches.Maybe because it’s one of the most undeveloped of my commute and I grew up thinking while driving across very wide open spaces? I don’t know.

I do know that as I whizzed down that road one day this week, I thought about my siblings’ future, where I want to travel this year, who I no longer have a crush on, moving, and then, about losing thinking time behind my steering wheel.

Where will I think?

what's in a visit

I saw a Seinfield episode today with a scene where George, Eliane and Jerry were visiting over breakfast by talking at once. All three rambled about topics completely unrelated to each other and I thought to myself, "there is something cool about that kind of friendship."

New York for New Years

Hadn’t really been planning this but an invitation from Heather landed me in Times Square for the big night. Katie, Heather and I drove up Sunday morning, parked in New Jersey, and took the subway into the city.
A friend of Heather’s graciously let us stay in her apartment so that’s where we headed first. From the time we saw the Statue of Liberty across the water to the time we pulled into our driveway the next day, Katie was bubbling over with excitement at hanging out in New York. She saw beauty in everything - from the signs over run-down little shops, to the sky scrapers that was our view from the apartment window on the twenty-fourth floor, to the signs in the metro, and she took a lot of pictures. It was fun to see her get so charged about the city.
And Heather was so comfortable and fun with hanging out and getting around in New York that it wasn’t stressful at all.
Cities, any shape or size, stress me out but this trip was ok.
We were hungry after the drive up and figured we’d be even hungrier standing in one spot out in the cold for several hours so out to get a big lunch we went.
Greek food. Very good. And a good talk about politics.
It was strangely fun to talk about politics outside of Washington D.C. I felt like I enjoyed a political conversation a lot more sitting in a restaurant on a New York street corner than I would here so close to it all.
Anyway, we finished and hurried to the Square. As soon as we got in the general area, we saw the masses. Saw and felt them pushing up against us as we tried to walk and not loose each other. The masses got larger the further we walked. By the time we got to Times Square the streets leading up to it were starting to get blocked off so we kept walking further and further up. 40th Street. "They’ll let you in at 42th Street, an officer said. "No, not here. You have to go up to 49th."
Not without a bit of sneaking and pleading did we get into the Times Square, around the Broadway area, at 49th. I felt like a wall of bodies were knocking me over into the people in front of me as they pushed their way to get in faster.
The spot we ended up at was right in front of a pizza restaurant. We were penned in, and couldn’t see the stage because we were too far back but we could see what was going on the stage on a screen and we could see the crystal ball.
We could also watch the NYPD officers march up and down trying to control the crowds, and the pizza man come through and take orders for pizza and hot chocolate all night. People in the hotels above us threw rolls of toilet paper down and they unfurled like giant pieces of confetti to the whooping and hollering of the crowd bellow and that was also interesting to watch.
Katie made friends with Italians sitting next to us and one of them taught her a cool magic trick. A couple on the other side of our spot on the road played cards with for a while. Finally, after over 7 hours of hanging out in one spot with hundreds of strangers in the cold and with no bathroom, faintly hearing famous performers sing out into the last night of 2006 and watching the little crystal ball in the distance flash cool colors, the 60 second count down began.
60, 59, 58, ....4, 3.
I know there was a 2, 1, 0 and that the crystal ball fell and broke, but I turned around to take a picture of the pizza restaurant employees spraying champagne and kind of missed that last part. Oh well.
Fun times. Would I do it again? Not unless I had a really good reason to. Worth it? Yah, it was.