Ten Little Chances to be Free (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
tenlittlebullets) wrote2008-02-21 04:02 am
tenlittlebullets) wrote2008-02-21 04:02 am
I feel like ranting.
Good things:
More Révolutions du XIXe siècle coming up.
I emerged from the UMD library at about 11 o'clock, just in time for the lunar eclipse. The moon wasn't completely in shadow anymore, but it was still cool--there was a little ring of white around one edge.
I finally got a prescription for some birth control, so now you guys don't have to listen to me whining about my menstrual cramps anymore. Also, my doctor is awesome.
Bad things:
When I un-hibernated my computer after getting back from UMD, all my Firefox extensions stopped working. What the hell? I rebooted the computer and it's fixed now, but still. WTF?
I just realized I have no idea what airline we're flying on to Switzerland, and if it's Continental I don't know what I'm going to do--they absolutely 100% refuse to accomodate peanut allergies. Southwest still serves peanuts by default, but will substitute something else if you notify them about the allergy; Continental's response to "I could die from inhaling peanut dust; could you serve pretzels on this flight instead?" is "Tough shit." Normally peanut dust is not a problem for me, but all the air on planes is recirculated so it never really dissipates--last year I forgot to tell Southwest about the allergy and wound up with some pretty nasty itching and irritation that could easily have progressed to something much worse. And that was a quick overland jaunt to Texas. The idea of breathing peanut dust all through a ten-hour plane ride, seven hours of which will be spent over the middle of the Atlantic Ocean with no hope of an emergency landing if I go into respiratory arrest, is just slightly horrifying.
I've emailed my dad, and he'll get back to me tomorrow. In all probability we're flying Lufthansa or something. But on the offchance that it's Continental and we can't rebook, this is serious enough for me to just not go.
I love UMD's library. Adore. I haven't even looked at much outside of the DC folio stacks, where the French history lives, but whenever I go, I have to force myself to stick to the ones titled Révolutions du XIXe siècle and not, say, Recueil des Actes du Comité de Salut Public. (Not that I'd even know where to start--that one spans 27 volumes of a few hundred pages each. But I want to look through it someday.) Unfortunately, UMD itself is a quarter of the way around the Beltway, it took me three visits and one parking ticket to find the visitor parking, and, well, it's in College Park. I hate driving in College Park. The traffic being bad is par for the course in the DC area, but it's also hard to keep a sense of direction there, the signage is craptastically confusing, and if you get going in the wrong direction you get a tour of all the finest strip malls, liquor stores, and no-tell motels the area has to offer.
And then there's that one intersection. I thought I imagined it the first time it almost got me killed, but no, I went through it again tonight, and then I googlemapped it so it must exist. 193 (Greenbelt Ave/University Blvd) with 201, to get back to the Beltway (aka 495). It looks so innocuous on that page. What Google doesn't tell you is that as you drive down University Boulevard wondering how to get to 495, you start seeing signs like "I-95/I-495, Beltway, left exit," "I-495 take Rt. 201, 1 mile ahead on left," and then a great big honking "495 VIA 201, LEFT LANE." And the left lane turns into a turn lane, complete with left-turn arrows on the pavement--right before a traffic light, in fact! A traffic light that does not have a left-turn green arrow even though you have to turn across some heavy oncoming traffic, but hey, it's not like there's a no-left-turn sign or anything, so this must be it. You're in a turn lane, after all.
So you turn left. And find yourself driving the wrong way down a highway ramp.
If you're lucky, nobody is coming up the ramp at the moment this intersection reveals its true colors. After you start breathing again, make a frantic U-turn, console the near-hysterical occupant of the passenger seat, and get back on the original road, you realize that the real left turn was on the other side of the overpass.
The sheer evil of this intersection cannot be expressed in words, so here is a crude GIF rendering. Just ignore the fact that in real life it's a divided highway with lanes going the other direction and everything; I was just too lazy to draw them. Besides, they are irrelevant to the Pure Evil.
(I probably wouldn't feel the need to bitch about this with illustrated examples, but I'm feeling grumpy because googlemaps just reminded me that the East-West Highway comes out really close to UMD. My doctor's office is literally on the East-West Highway, and the traffic on it was really light when I set out from the doctor's to UMD, but I didn't realize the connection and wound up taking the Beltway. At rush hour. And getting flipped off by some asshole who cut to the front of a line of merging cars and then almost ran me off the road when I wouldn't let him in. I hate the Beltway.)
More Révolutions du XIXe siècle coming up.
I emerged from the UMD library at about 11 o'clock, just in time for the lunar eclipse. The moon wasn't completely in shadow anymore, but it was still cool--there was a little ring of white around one edge.
I finally got a prescription for some birth control, so now you guys don't have to listen to me whining about my menstrual cramps anymore. Also, my doctor is awesome.
Bad things:
When I un-hibernated my computer after getting back from UMD, all my Firefox extensions stopped working. What the hell? I rebooted the computer and it's fixed now, but still. WTF?
I just realized I have no idea what airline we're flying on to Switzerland, and if it's Continental I don't know what I'm going to do--they absolutely 100% refuse to accomodate peanut allergies. Southwest still serves peanuts by default, but will substitute something else if you notify them about the allergy; Continental's response to "I could die from inhaling peanut dust; could you serve pretzels on this flight instead?" is "Tough shit." Normally peanut dust is not a problem for me, but all the air on planes is recirculated so it never really dissipates--last year I forgot to tell Southwest about the allergy and wound up with some pretty nasty itching and irritation that could easily have progressed to something much worse. And that was a quick overland jaunt to Texas. The idea of breathing peanut dust all through a ten-hour plane ride, seven hours of which will be spent over the middle of the Atlantic Ocean with no hope of an emergency landing if I go into respiratory arrest, is just slightly horrifying.
I've emailed my dad, and he'll get back to me tomorrow. In all probability we're flying Lufthansa or something. But on the offchance that it's Continental and we can't rebook, this is serious enough for me to just not go.
I love UMD's library. Adore. I haven't even looked at much outside of the DC folio stacks, where the French history lives, but whenever I go, I have to force myself to stick to the ones titled Révolutions du XIXe siècle and not, say, Recueil des Actes du Comité de Salut Public. (Not that I'd even know where to start--that one spans 27 volumes of a few hundred pages each. But I want to look through it someday.) Unfortunately, UMD itself is a quarter of the way around the Beltway, it took me three visits and one parking ticket to find the visitor parking, and, well, it's in College Park. I hate driving in College Park. The traffic being bad is par for the course in the DC area, but it's also hard to keep a sense of direction there, the signage is craptastically confusing, and if you get going in the wrong direction you get a tour of all the finest strip malls, liquor stores, and no-tell motels the area has to offer.
And then there's that one intersection. I thought I imagined it the first time it almost got me killed, but no, I went through it again tonight, and then I googlemapped it so it must exist. 193 (Greenbelt Ave/University Blvd) with 201, to get back to the Beltway (aka 495). It looks so innocuous on that page. What Google doesn't tell you is that as you drive down University Boulevard wondering how to get to 495, you start seeing signs like "I-95/I-495, Beltway, left exit," "I-495 take Rt. 201, 1 mile ahead on left," and then a great big honking "495 VIA 201, LEFT LANE." And the left lane turns into a turn lane, complete with left-turn arrows on the pavement--right before a traffic light, in fact! A traffic light that does not have a left-turn green arrow even though you have to turn across some heavy oncoming traffic, but hey, it's not like there's a no-left-turn sign or anything, so this must be it. You're in a turn lane, after all.
So you turn left. And find yourself driving the wrong way down a highway ramp.
If you're lucky, nobody is coming up the ramp at the moment this intersection reveals its true colors. After you start breathing again, make a frantic U-turn, console the near-hysterical occupant of the passenger seat, and get back on the original road, you realize that the real left turn was on the other side of the overpass.
The sheer evil of this intersection cannot be expressed in words, so here is a crude GIF rendering. Just ignore the fact that in real life it's a divided highway with lanes going the other direction and everything; I was just too lazy to draw them. Besides, they are irrelevant to the Pure Evil.
(I probably wouldn't feel the need to bitch about this with illustrated examples, but I'm feeling grumpy because googlemaps just reminded me that the East-West Highway comes out really close to UMD. My doctor's office is literally on the East-West Highway, and the traffic on it was really light when I set out from the doctor's to UMD, but I didn't realize the connection and wound up taking the Beltway. At rush hour. And getting flipped off by some asshole who cut to the front of a line of merging cars and then almost ran me off the road when I wouldn't let him in. I hate the Beltway.)