Yesterday evening was going to be fun. After working at home all day (bliss!) I was to meet up with the stellar Biff at a Lebanese eatery on the south side of Raleigh for dinner, because he was 1) working down that way in the afternoon and 2) had band practice in the thereabouts at 6:30. Didn’t make sense for him to come home to Wake Forest, which is approximately a million miles away in Raleigh-think, so to him I did go.
Got my directions to Neomonde, got presentable (in my new tie-dye shirt straight from the Haight!), and with glee started up Tinkerbell.
At which point it started to rain. And then rain harder, and as I got onto Route 1 South the skies decided to open right the hell on UP and dump vast screaming bucketloads of liquid mayhem onto hapless commuters, harried moms, tired landscape guys, and me. Oh, the windshield wipers were going as fast as they possibly could, and even with THAT it was tough to tell where the lane markers were or, perhaps more importantly, where the road was quickly turning into a lake.
Slap slap went the wipers.
Thump thump went my heart.
"Oh crap" went my brain.
Note to the unaware: Me so very much hatey the rainy driving. As a result I drive like a myopic gramma, bolting along at speeds well under the posted limit in an effort to not get dead or even slightly injured. Caution is my middle name when things are less than ideal on the roads, weather-wise. But, sadly, caution was not on the minds of all my fellow travellers, and thus it was that 44o West turned into a goat rope of nearly epic proportion. A accident occurred 3 cars in front of me, which apparently was the last in a chain of spin-outs and crashes that had disabled something like 20 cars, all at once. There were auto corpses all over the shoulders and lanes, sideways, backways, all ways around. Some callous drivers (me included) who had survived drove around the scenes o the crimes and continued on, firm in the belief that getting to where we were going was better than standing out in the rain being some sort of Good Samaritan, which I’m happy to report the UPS dude was already doing.
And then, after navigating through what seemed like a scene for an Armaggeddon-based film, the sun came out. Hooray, SUN! Yay! Rain's over! But what's this? The sun, at 5 p.m. after a good hard rain, can (and did) effectively BLIND all of us driving west into the glare and spray. So, let's go ahead and order up another another 3 or 4 accidents, committed by people who were, I’m sure, happy at the meteorologic turn of events and thus stunned stupid by relief. Newsflash - No matter what, my friends, you cannot SEE through backlit roadspray at 5 in the afternoon! It's...sparkly and pretty and certain death, you know? Especially not when you’re going 50 miles an hour straight into it! Morons! Imbeciles! Oh I was all highfalutin' in my rage. Those morons were clearly the stupidest beings on the planet, and about to kill us all. Highly unacceptable. I could have told them that they should just drive like me! I could have lead them safely home if they'd just.slow.down. But no. Nobody was listing to me, and so? 440 West, once again, became a parking lot.
What is it with people? I simply don’t know.
The long and short of this tale is that all the rain, accidents, and resulting standstill ‘traffic’ made me half an hour late for my date with Biff, which is a something that is not happy news. I like the guy, what can I say?? Plus which we only had an hour to begin with, so there’s a 50% loss of quality time right there. Boo, hiss.
But! Guess what? There were hugs and baklava, so that made it almost all better.
And then we got to meet a lady who makes felted art, and once the thunderboomer rolled through the evening was spectacularly gorgeous in a very moist and green way, so hey. Could have been worse.
How YOU doin’?
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