Nope. I completely glazed over the spandex, mostly because I don’t usually see people on bicycles riding in the car lane when there’s a bike lane. My mistake! :smack:
As a biker-on-a-bicycle, I’d like to apologize for all the douchewads out there. Some of us ride like dicks (which is stupid, especially when you’re pissing off drivers that could paralyze you for life with the flick of their steering wheel).
I’ll tell you what April brings. April brings a fucking freak ice-pellet storm followed by freezing rain and it has completely ruined my Saturday night plans. The driveway plow guy has not come by, my immediate street is unplowed anyway and is a mess of semi-frozen icy goop, I have no snow tires, and I can’t even get the fucking car out of the garage. It should normally be fairly warm and springtime sunny by this time of year, but not when I have plans, no, that’s when every possible freak weather system descends on us.
Just stopping by to pit co-workers in a volunteer organization who make a big deal about making commitments and then don’t follow through on them. I know there have been pittings about that before, but this one involves a deadline which, if we don’t meet it, all our work is completely and utterly for nothing. Think of Cinderella’s coach at midnight, only there won’t even be a pumpkin left. Plus we didn’t have any choice except to depend on this person to come through.
I don’t know much about this person’s private life except what I am told, so there could be all kinds of family crisis or other stresses behind this failure, but if that was a possibility it would have been nice to have had a fallback plan of some kind. And if that was actually going on, it would be nice if there could be a response to my nudging “how’s it going” email from 8 hours ago (already 12+ hours late at that point), instead of crickets.
This is why I hate working in groups. Ask me to do something, and it gets done by deadline. Ask me to work in a group to get something done, and I end up doing most of the work anyway and having to stress about other people’s lack of work ethic, lack of response, and general head-in-the-sand hoping that it will all work out somehow. I am tired of being “somehow.”
I’m sitting here watching TV when I was supposed to be at a movie. I’m used to driving on icy winter roads, but when it was too slick to make it ten feet to the garage, I chickened out.
Probably just as well for both of us. I’ve driven in all sorts of winter weather for many decades, but I’ve never seen anything quite like this. It took major engine power just to back into the shit that was in the driveway outside the garage, and then it was a challenge to get back in. Meanwhile some sort of pellet/drizzle/freezing rain type shit was coming down on my nice clean dry car.
I could have called the plow operator and demanded that they come by right away, but that experience convinced me that I might get stuck pretty much anywhere in this wet muck. Police were advising people not to drive, and the news sites had lots of pictures of cars in positions in which you rarely see cars, like sitting on their sides or on their roofs in a ditch.
Man, I hate having a big spider on my bed!
But little ones are okay?
How about a tarantula burger?
Oh no, I am NOT clicking on that.
Me either. But, how did a big spider get on your bed? I would not be able to sleep til I found out where, why, how.
*Spider-pillow /
Spider-pillow,
that’s as scary /
as Godzilla…
Spider-pillow /
Spider-pillow,
Sell that house NOW /
(on Spider-Zillow)…*
Well, if you really want to know…
[spoiler]I saw it on top of my bedside cabinet. I immediately grabbed my spider-catcher from the next room and returned in a matter of seconds, but the spider was nowhere to be seen. I moved my bed from about six inches away from the cabinet to about a foot away, and started a careful search of the area. Then a few minutes later, I saw a big spider running along the side of my bed.
I immediately used my spider-catcher on it, but was only able to grab it by one of its legs. Fortunately, spider-catcher is amazing and that’s typically enough to keep an eight-legged home invader secured and shackled. Then I put it out the window and closed and locked the window, and will probably never open it again.
I don’t know how it got from the bedside cabinet to my bed, though. It either climbed down the cabinet and up a bed leg in a fairly short space of time, or it jumped the six inch gap. Unless… there are two big spiders. All three scenarios are pretty terrifying.
The good news is that science and technology has made great leaps and bounds in recent years, and is starting make progress in tackling the really big issues. The spider-catcher is one of humankind’s greatest inventions, and one of its most needed. You can see footage of it in action here. [warning: includes footage of real spiders]
[/spoiler]
No, I won’t be looking at that. I believe you about it. I would be looking some more for your spiders wife, she’s probably laying eggs right now. Aaacckkk!
Well . . . don’t leave us hangin…
Well, it’s possible that for your elderly mother that some of the repetition servers as a cognition test (which you probably are passing with flying colors 
).
Probably not true (especially after four times), but if I were the doctor, that would be my story if called out on it.
18 inches of snow halfway through April.
With more today and Wednesday.
The plow driver got stuck in my driveway this morning. We ended up going out and helping him dig out.
Went to the linen closet to get TP to put in the bathrooms. Guess what I found in the sack from Walmart. Yep. My wallet and cell phone. I need a life coach.
In college I was always losing my keys. My roommate got tired of finding them for me, so she put a hook on the wall right inside the door. I’ve done the same ever since. Do you have a table or something near the door you normally use? If so, put a basket or something there and make it a habit to drop your wallet and phone and keys there as you walk in. I am seriously ADD, but I’ve been able to make it a habit with the keys and haven’t lost them since.
After yesterday’s snow pellets and freezing rain fiasco forced cancellation of all my Saturday plans, the streets did finally get plowed and the guy who does my driveway came by, too. I redid my social plans for Monday, and everything looked good.
And I look out the window today and it’s an exact repeat of Saturday! :mad: More of the same shit has been falling all night. The driveway plow guy was just here again and there’s a limit to what even the heavy plow can do with this shit, because he has to back-drag from the garage door where there’s about a foot of frozen gloop, and back-dragging just slips over ice. This is not like snow, it’s more like the work of demons from a frozen hell. Even if I had a powerful two-stage snow blower it would likely either ride over this frozen hellscape or stall. At least a determined effort with the plow got rid of most of it, but by no means all of it. This is quite something to be going through in the middle of April when you’d normally be starting gardening.
What tomorrow will be like is anybody’s guess. It’s supposed to be much warmer with heavy rain so there’s hope. I have about 30 pounds of rock salt that I can throw at some of it to help things along.