Saturday, December 17th, 2011
Another day on the road, another 500 miles behind me. TO be honest, it was 548 today, but in general, 500 a day is a good day. With each passing day comes myriad opportunities, from wildlife viewing (not all of it living) to meteorology, sociology, a basic geology and sometimes, chaos theory. Science abounds in everyday life. I find curiosity solves a lot of life's little vexations.
In the wildlife realm of things, I've had a fairly good streak of late. I awoke this morning at 0200 PST to prepare for my delivery. I was parked right in back of the store, so getting ready essentially meant throwing some oatmeal together, getting dressed and taking those 2 steps to the drivers seat and driving all of 150 yards around a corner. Tough gig, I know. To my surprise, there was a freakin' HUGE snowshoe hare just across the street munching on what little grass was left. We're talking the size of an enormous cat of small dog, huge. Or maybe it was all that fur, which was white all over save for the tips of the ears and feet. Absolutely adorable! Getting out to walk around my truck, a large bird swooped down into the field near the Costco. I can only speculate that it was some kind of owl, for it was too dark over there to identify it. Other sightings today included a dead fox and a dead coyote, plus myriad corvids and a bunch of magpies. Neat!
As far as weather goes, there was little to report, save a brilliant sunset, and equally brilliant sunrise. The sunset was by far the more breathtaking, wave upon wave of cloud rippled from pink to apricot across the western sky.
The biggest chance for study is the human mind and it's collective stupidity.. err collective thinking. There was a crash along the highway today on the southbound side some place in Calgary. Big City. Stuff like this happens a lot I would imagine. So of course one lane is blocked off for the care bears and other emergency vehicles, leaving two others with which to bypass the scene. Chaos theory comes into play here, since we are dealing with tons of people trying to cram through a tiny bottleneck. Watching people merge left and right as far back as a mile, since nobody had any idea what lane the crash was in. I personally grabbed the middle lane, since I could only be one lane off in either direction, and it was moving faster. Practical above all else I suppose. Upon reaching the scene, we were down to one lane, the far left. After all the merging was done (thanks to some kind people with lots of patience) everyone was obliged to drive by the accident. That is to say that everyone got to drive by really slow and look at the severe damage to the car that rear-ended somebody or drove into the off ramp divider, it was unclear. We call this rubber-necking. Even more curious to me was the north bound side slowed down just as much as we did (about 15k/ph) to see the accident. Traffic was unimpeded on that side. What is it about humans that wish to see such tragedy? Is it our innate desire to be glad that it happened to someone else? Or perhaps a reassurance that the negative energy for the day has found an outlet in (again) some one else. Maybe a simple reminder to drive safe and stop being a douche.
Which brings me to my personal test of getting cut off. After yesterday, you'd think I would have learned my lesson. A slow moving truck pulled out in front of me, and thankfully i got to pass him after 45 minutes. Still, I could feel the frustration rising. Then I finally let go of it. What a relief. The biggest help was realizing that this guy was trying to do the best he could, and that I was obviously lighter than he was and I would have a chance to pass him at some point. Simple but effective. I wonder how far across the board of human thought that such a notion could be extrapolated.... Maybe not too far. I've found that most people focus on what is in front of them, and seldom much further down the road (heh).
In other news, I have learned that there has been some confusion about my home time. My understanding was that I had changed it with my DM from the 26th of December to the 19th of December. Either way, I am supposed to be out and running over Christmas. So I was a bit shocked to learn that my original request for the 26th is still in the system. I was a bit upset about this at first, then I realized that there would be nothing I could do about it until Monday when my DM gets back in the office. Actually, the best thing I can do is to run this load as fast (and as safe) as I can to Portland, OR and hope that I can work this out on Monday and get a load up to Seattle, which should work. We'll see I guess. Until then, I'm going to run like its my job, because it is.
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