Got home at 4:30 Central time today, having driven since six a.m. Eastern time. (For those of you unfamiliar with US time zones, that's eleven and a half hours total.) Traffic in Chattanooga and Huntsville was worse than metro DC, due to the number of bad wrecks I saw today.Rule #1: if you are driving a truck, and you are hauling a heavily-laden U-Haul trailer, it is most definitely in your best interest to obey the little road sign thingies when they yell things like "Sharp Curve Ahead - Slow To 40 MPH, You Dumbass." Mr.

Let's compare… As always, usernames not changed, for purposes of ridiculing the guilty.

Painful experiences supposedly get better with the passage of time. Everyone's heard the adage that the pain of labor is forgotten shortly after the arrival of the child, and supposedly this sort of adage applies to lots more things than just labor.

I've got one word for you guys: liars. Tonight, while ostensibly digging for knitting and crochet patterns, I found a folder that I hadn't opened in quite some time. The first sheet of paper contained a grid of some kind, and when I looked closer, I started laughing.

The icky semester.
by domesticat.
[original on flickr]

"I felt like the moon, the stars, and all the planets had fallen on me."
—Harry Truman

Even at two weeks out from the actual anniversary, the headlines gathering like storm clouds on news shows and websites still make me cringe and simmer with anger. "The day that changed the world." "The Unthinkable." "Day of Terror."

On the eleventh day of September, 2001, I sat at my computer, stunned beyond measure, and wrote:

"Oh, God, not THIS guy again."

Our local deity, being uncharacteristically busy with the lives of the other billions of people on this planet, chose to overlook the fact that, even under the best of circumstances, I cannot stand tech #89.

"Best," of course, not being the day after a series of days where you've had to continually reboot the cable modem so that you can test your code. Nor is "best" the day that your quest to buy groceries turns into a multiple-grocery-store chase, just to find the [damned] Gruyère cheese for tonight's dinner, immediately followed by racing back to ensure you were home for the 1p.m.-5p.m. window that the cable guys always demand.Therefore, in the global view of things, I suppose it wasn't any big deal to send tech number eighty-nine to our house.

Ever heard the saying, "Just because you can do something, doesn't mean you should"? Today's interaction with a grocery-store cashier brought this axiom to mind. Granted, I had plenty of time to think about it, given that it took her an exceedingly long period of time to ring up my order.