The "Stage Two" portion of flight training should, in my opinion, be called "Stage Oh-you-thought-stage-1-was-difficult?" My instructor told me the second half would be easier, which I was looking forward to, especially since we decided to more than double the pace of my training. Unfortunately, it does not seem to be easier. I was in a plane for 2.9 hours (2 hours and 54 minutes) on Saturday and during that time I was smothered by a barrage of tasks that left me maybe 90 seconds of time to think. In a three hour flight.
On the bright side, I did get to fly through SeaTac's airspace last week. Like almost everything we do with the airplane these days, it was scary and I had no interest in doing it. SeaTac is what I think of as a real airport. The kind my friends fly in on. Its not just a runway with buildings. It is one of the busiest airports in the world, with an enormous complex containing numerous terminals and hangers and shops and escalators and security theatres. The air traffic controllers at SeaTac talk about twice as fast as the air traffic controllers I usually deal with (which, for reference, is like twice as fast as a teenage girl). However, once I had made our radio call and gotten permission to fly over SeaTac (after making the radio controller think I was a total idiot) we flew over the runways--while a jet was landing. We flew over a jet, a commercial jet, the kind that carries people. And I could see the tower (this should not be surprising, as they damn sure wanted to keep an eye on me). For some reason that got me super psyched for being a pilot: knowing that people I know could be flying to Seattle on some big jet, and here I could be flying over them as they landed.
Then Saturday we did a cross country flight. This involves spending more time doing paperwork than actually flying the airplane. Such paperwork includes drawing pencil lines on maps and reading twenty pages of "CIG BLW 010/VIS BLW 3SM BR. CONS CONT THRU 09Z." In theory, I can read that. You fill out this navigation log that you take with you and are supposed to write on while your flying the airplane. I did boost my confidence to land at two airports I'd never been too, but filling out that stupid nav log sucked all the joy out of flying.
Then I came home, and was to tired to go out, and needed to go to bed early so I could get up early and make up some of the work I've missed because of flying lessons, so I stayed at home and started watching tv, but apparently everyone else who likes the shows that I like was out having fun, because there was nothing on tv. I watched a little comedy central, but then a Girls Gone Wild commercial came on to remind me that I was another loser sitting at home watching tv on a saturday night. It was so depressing I actually muted the commercial and surfed through the tv guide. And then--I don't know if you know this--I learned that those stupid commercials last like five minutes. Videos of girls that you pay money for. That's not a difficult concept to grasp.
Despite how much I complain about being busy, I still have 1-2 hours of free time before going to bed. I should spend it studying flight stuff, but usually sick of it by then. I used to spend that time on craiglist and okcupid, but that only convinced me that there are no girls on the internet. For a week or two I started playing this medieval game called Evony, which I discovered because I clicked on a banner ad with a half naked girl with a provocative facial expression. The game was ok, and I was quite happy while playing it. You build these cities, and then attack people. And then my cities got attacked by someone with a lot more time on their hands, and so I quit. This means I am back to having an hour or two of free time. I think I might buy a windows computer just so I can play computer games again.
Speaking of windows, I've discovered a wonderful new "feature" of Ubuntu. I use quotes around "feature" because it is clearly a bug or design flaw that was introduced intentionally by someone who will live a long and healthy life if they never meet me. Before I describe this feature, I would just like to say that one of the things that impressed me with Linux was its ability to actually work. Like, it does what you tell it to. Tell it to take down a network interface, and the interface goes down. Send a HUP (or whatever) to the graphical system, and it reloads. Tell it to shutdown now, and the system literally shuts down now. It doesnt run around asking programs if they feel like stopping, it just gives them a chance to clean up and halts the system. Well, unless you run Ubuntu. When I tell Ubuntu to shut down, I come back to my computer 8 hours later surprised to find it still running, with a message that "Unknown Program" failed to shut down. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but I take it that this means shutting down linux is becoming like shutting down windows: the operating system runs around asking all the programs if they fell like stopping, and if one doesn't, for example a poorly written Nokia 2600 driver, or the print spooler, or, I don't know, a virus that shouldn't be there anyway, then the operating system doesn't shut down. One more aspect of Windows that I absolutely hate has been ported over.
Someday...I am just going to take an entire day and fix my computer situation. Of course I also need to fix my clothing situation, and my furnitue situation, and my empty walls situation. People were making fun of my coffee table, which was still a cardboard box, so I moved the box to the side of the futon in my living room and made it into an end table. I really like boxes for that reason...with a little imagination, they can become any piece of furniture you want. So...I need to go to Ikea soon. I also need a shelf for my desk at work; I have 4 monitors at work (counting my laptop) and I'd like to up that to about 6 or 7, but there is no more room on my desk so I'm going vertical, and for that I need a monitor shelf that can hold 3 or 4 20" monitors. I can't seem to find any for some reason. I am hoping Ikea has some kind of do-it-yourself modular shelving unit that will work for me.
Sunday, August 23, 2009
Monday, August 17, 2009
The Kessel run, in 12 parsecs
A friend-of-a-friend stopped by over the weekend, spending the night here to avoid a hotel. Turns out, she's like a level 10 conversationalist. After both living alone and not having many friends for so many month, my larynx appears to have atrophied. It was exciting. We basically had like a 10 hour conversation that included Batman, Keanu Reeves, and our mutual friend Kristy. And hotdogs. And why I look down on people who wear shirts with text written "in binary" on them. And actually a lot of other things that would take too long to list. And then I got a sore throat. Apparently there is this thing called laryngitis that you get when you talk too much. Ironic...I can be a fairly quiet guy, and I have a few friends back home who I think deserve to have caught this before I did.
She visited me Saturday and I didn't get the fever until today, so my 10 minute diagnosis made while browsing webmd could be slightly innacurate. Just to be safe I took all of the "home treatment" lists for all sore throat topics and concatenated them into one big list and...long story short I now have a humidifier in my room. I have for over a year avoided buying a humidifier because I thought it would make me look like a big dork, like the character Walter in the movie Sleepless in Seattle. The air in my Philly apartment used to get so dry that my nose felt like I had stabbed it with a knife. I tried non-humidifier solutions, such just sort of wishing the air would have more moisture (ineffective), as well as boiling a large pot of water on my gas stove. The large pot of water worked great until the night I was hanging out with a girl and we heard the fire alarm go off because all the water had boiled off. I threw that pot away.
In my current apartment, I've been facing the same problem. I bought a bamboo plant from Ikea and when I brought it home the leaves turned brown, which according to the internet means that the air is so dry that water evaporates out of the leaves before it can be sucked up from the roots. I still didn't buy a humidifier though. I just moved the bamboo near the kitchen sink, figuring it was at least close to more water. I mean, the entire thing is submerged in a solution of water and rocks. It can't be that bad.
Anyway, now I'm sick, and I have one. This is probably the worst designed humidifier ever; it lacks the ability to regulate its own temperature, or stop automatically, and there is high risk of circuit overload and/or overheating and/or fire. And you have to refill the tank manually, every time you use it. Tomorrow is the day the maintnance people are entering my apartment to test the smoke detectors. Tomorrow will also be the first day I forget to turn off the humidifier, so that will be interesting.
Whatever. I'm not refilling this thing every night. I mean, I am, but this is gonna stop when I'm not sick anymore. Also, since its method of adding water to the air is evaporation, the process is adding heat to the room. My apartment is already 85 degrees (see earlier posts where I complain about the lack of air conditioning in this city) and I've basically just added a heater. And the directions say if it doesn't work (it didn't) you have to sprinkle on some salt (I did). Like a steak. We'll see how this goes. I have to admit, though, I'm in my bedroom right now (where the humidifier is running) and my throat feels a tiny bit better. Although, scientifically speaking, I have no way to be sure it is the humidifier and not the salt water I gargled or the soup or the five cups of tea or the giant dayquil tabs I nearly choked on. Seriously, I don't think I've ever taken bigger pills. I was opening the package, asking myself "do they really need to be this big?" when I heard a still small voice in the back of my head say "THATS WHAT SHE SAID!"
My flight instructor showed me how to do a flight plan last night. Then he sent me home, not realizing just how dumb I am. Since I am supposed to make a flight plan by Friday, I figured I'd get it done tonight. Then I looked at my sectional chart to begin and realized that I didn't actually know how latitude works. I understood the general concepts, yes. Longitude goes one way, latitude goes another, etc. What I did not know, was exactly how this business of minutes and seconds went down, or why there was a "30" on the side of the chart. Apparently, and I'm not happy with whoever came up with this, someone decided that it would be fun to divide units of latitude into 60 minutes, and the minutes again into 60 seconds. Seriously, did they not have the decimal system back then? Our number system is based on the number 10. And who measures distance in "minutes" and "seconds" ??? Whats next, a calendar demarcated in parsecs ?
She visited me Saturday and I didn't get the fever until today, so my 10 minute diagnosis made while browsing webmd could be slightly innacurate. Just to be safe I took all of the "home treatment" lists for all sore throat topics and concatenated them into one big list and...long story short I now have a humidifier in my room. I have for over a year avoided buying a humidifier because I thought it would make me look like a big dork, like the character Walter in the movie Sleepless in Seattle. The air in my Philly apartment used to get so dry that my nose felt like I had stabbed it with a knife. I tried non-humidifier solutions, such just sort of wishing the air would have more moisture (ineffective), as well as boiling a large pot of water on my gas stove. The large pot of water worked great until the night I was hanging out with a girl and we heard the fire alarm go off because all the water had boiled off. I threw that pot away.
In my current apartment, I've been facing the same problem. I bought a bamboo plant from Ikea and when I brought it home the leaves turned brown, which according to the internet means that the air is so dry that water evaporates out of the leaves before it can be sucked up from the roots. I still didn't buy a humidifier though. I just moved the bamboo near the kitchen sink, figuring it was at least close to more water. I mean, the entire thing is submerged in a solution of water and rocks. It can't be that bad.
Anyway, now I'm sick, and I have one. This is probably the worst designed humidifier ever; it lacks the ability to regulate its own temperature, or stop automatically, and there is high risk of circuit overload and/or overheating and/or fire. And you have to refill the tank manually, every time you use it. Tomorrow is the day the maintnance people are entering my apartment to test the smoke detectors. Tomorrow will also be the first day I forget to turn off the humidifier, so that will be interesting.
Whatever. I'm not refilling this thing every night. I mean, I am, but this is gonna stop when I'm not sick anymore. Also, since its method of adding water to the air is evaporation, the process is adding heat to the room. My apartment is already 85 degrees (see earlier posts where I complain about the lack of air conditioning in this city) and I've basically just added a heater. And the directions say if it doesn't work (it didn't) you have to sprinkle on some salt (I did). Like a steak. We'll see how this goes. I have to admit, though, I'm in my bedroom right now (where the humidifier is running) and my throat feels a tiny bit better. Although, scientifically speaking, I have no way to be sure it is the humidifier and not the salt water I gargled or the soup or the five cups of tea or the giant dayquil tabs I nearly choked on. Seriously, I don't think I've ever taken bigger pills. I was opening the package, asking myself "do they really need to be this big?" when I heard a still small voice in the back of my head say "THATS WHAT SHE SAID!"
My flight instructor showed me how to do a flight plan last night. Then he sent me home, not realizing just how dumb I am. Since I am supposed to make a flight plan by Friday, I figured I'd get it done tonight. Then I looked at my sectional chart to begin and realized that I didn't actually know how latitude works. I understood the general concepts, yes. Longitude goes one way, latitude goes another, etc. What I did not know, was exactly how this business of minutes and seconds went down, or why there was a "30" on the side of the chart. Apparently, and I'm not happy with whoever came up with this, someone decided that it would be fun to divide units of latitude into 60 minutes, and the minutes again into 60 seconds. Seriously, did they not have the decimal system back then? Our number system is based on the number 10. And who measures distance in "minutes" and "seconds" ??? Whats next, a calendar demarcated in parsecs ?
Friday, August 14, 2009
I See What You're Doing There
I soloed last Saturday. That means my flight instructor started acting all shady, and then he got out of the airplane, and I took off by myself. Alone. I tried not to think about the fact that I was alone. In fact, I normally have to constantly tell my instructor what I'm doing (otherwise he doesn't know whether to scold me for forgetting to do something or just not doing it fast enough) and I continued this stream of updates...telling the empty chair beside me that there was no traffic on final, announcing to it my takeoff roll checklist, telling it when I was beginning my descent, etc.
Something you might find interesting about landing an airplane (besides the fact that it is ironically the most difficult maneuver) is that at the first sign of trouble the pilot adds full power, climbs back up into the sky, and flies all the way around the runway to try again. This is like if you were trying to park a car in your driveway and your neighboors dog got too close and you pulled back out and drove around the block again.
I had to do three landings, and in between I only had to do two go arounds. I also forgot that I was in a plane and not a car, literally, and tried to turn off the runway and onto a taxi way at like 20 knots, which made the plane skid across the tarmac a bit. Apparently planes were not made for cornering on the ground. Who knew?
In other news, I'm learning a lot about car insurance. Apparently the way this works is when you get into an accident, you don't just send the insurance company a receipt for the repair bill. No, some guy who is not a mechanic comes and looks at the car in your dimly lit garage, and then estimates how much the insurance company officially thinks it will cost to fix it. This estimate is based on crappy repair shops that use crappy parts but like getting business from the insurance companies. Then you take your car to a real repair shop, show them a picture of the duck boat that mauled your car, and they give you the real estimate which is larger than the insurance company's by a factor of 5.
The important part of the story is that I don't have a car for three weeks. I'm using zipcars to get to Boeing Field, which, by the way, was the reason I bought Jessica to begin with. So I wouldn't have to rent zipcars to get to the airport. But, again, I'm not in the hospital.
That reminds me though. I'd like to share an experience I've had while driving in the city of Seattle, so I spent about 20 minutes drawing this diagram:
Do you notice anything completely nonsensical about this intersection? Like maybe the force right turn where there are no one-way streets involved? Ladies and Gentlemen, this is a real intersection in Seattle. In fact, I dealt with this and two other similar intersections last night on my way back to drop off the zip car. There is no reason for this. It wasn't a big intersection, just two two-lane roads...intersecting. I was in the lucky lane that was forced to turn right when I actually needed to turn left. There was a cop there, so I turned right and drove a block out of my way and made my third u-turn for the night. Its as if the people designing the roads knew where I needed to go, and put all their unecessary limitations on that path of travel.
When I got here I was a bit starry-eyed and thought everyone here was pretty cool and smart. They're not. Nothing about this city appears to be well designed. In fact, the next time you see me remind me to bring my sectional so I can complain about the airspace here. But I digress.
I have a theory. It has little to no basis on facts, and is built on ignorance and assumptions, however, if a bunch of gay bloggers can make up ridiculous conspiracy theories about Amazon, I'm pretty confident I can say whatever I want about this city's governance. You see, we don't like cars here. We, as in the stupid hippies that "run things." Because we don't like cars, we try to do a bunch of things to make it really inconvenient to have one. For example, we design every parking garage in the city to have spaces sized for a small motorcycle, so that when a bunch of pretentious SUVs get parked there, everyone basically has to kind of open their door an inch and slide in and out of their car without choking on their own window. Then make all these bus lanes and bus-only bridges and intersections where only the busses go straight. Or we take roads like say...2nd and 3rd avenue, and make them one way (one way for cars only, not busses) but only during certain times of the day, like 6am to 9:30am and 5pm to 6:30pm, and all the roads on either size degrade into ridiculous mazes, so every unsuspecting driver who gets caught there will turn off and get caught in all kinds of ridiculous traffic during the unwanted detour.
However, we don't really offer anything to replace the cars with. Apparently, packing yourself onto a gas guzzling bus with a bunch of sketchy people is morally superior to driving a gas guzzling car. But we don't want people to have trains or anything. At least, not ones that go anywhere.
There is a monorail here. It goes roughly half a mile. According to some friends in a bar, the city spent 90 million on it, and then some dick living on the west side kept collecting signatures to vote on canceling the project, and it went to vote 9 times before the monorail project got canned. We have a bunch of bridges here with way to much traffic, and the highways in general rival Phillys 76 (which I didn't think was possible), but we can't get trains in and out because for some strange reason people keep voting them down. I don't really know what they vote for around here. I kind of want to register to vote here just so I go and vote no for everything.
We do have a light rail. Based on personal obervation, light rail means "small an inefficient train." The trains go through the bus tunnels, which I guess are actually just a subway now that real trains are going through. Well, except that the busses also go through the tunnels still. And someone, somewhere, made this rule that busses and trains cannot both be in the terminal at the same time, so both the busses and trains often have to wait at the threshold of a station while the other type departs. This means that you'll be on the train and you'll here "now arriving at westlake" and the trains stops and you stand up and look out through the windows at the walls of the tunnel.
The trains themselves are shiny, way shorter than a Philly subway train, and have a pathetic capacity. Imagine if someone sat down with you, handed you a piece of paper, and told you to design a train that held as few people as possible. That's how I think these trains got designed. You would think that if you got on a train, you would see maybe rows of chairs to sit on. Seattle's light rail trains instead actaully contain a number of walls, with a few seats tucked in here or there just so no one gets confused and thinks they're in a hallway. They go slightly faster than a bus.
Also, I am clearly in the minority of people who are bothered by this. The other people who live here seem to think that Seattle is awesome. In fact, some people that I've talked to actually moved here first, and then tried to find a job. They weren't just lured here by money. As in, they came here because they somehow thought Seattle was cool before they moved here. I'm not sure what's so great...annd...I probably shouldn't share this journal with any of them. I think our difference of opinion be a result of a difference in our definitions of awesome. When I think of "awesome" I usually think of me being the only male player on an all-female volleyball team. When other people think of "awesome" they seem to think of beer that isn't quite good enough to be sold more than 25 miles away from where its made. To each his own, I guess.
Something you might find interesting about landing an airplane (besides the fact that it is ironically the most difficult maneuver) is that at the first sign of trouble the pilot adds full power, climbs back up into the sky, and flies all the way around the runway to try again. This is like if you were trying to park a car in your driveway and your neighboors dog got too close and you pulled back out and drove around the block again.
I had to do three landings, and in between I only had to do two go arounds. I also forgot that I was in a plane and not a car, literally, and tried to turn off the runway and onto a taxi way at like 20 knots, which made the plane skid across the tarmac a bit. Apparently planes were not made for cornering on the ground. Who knew?
In other news, I'm learning a lot about car insurance. Apparently the way this works is when you get into an accident, you don't just send the insurance company a receipt for the repair bill. No, some guy who is not a mechanic comes and looks at the car in your dimly lit garage, and then estimates how much the insurance company officially thinks it will cost to fix it. This estimate is based on crappy repair shops that use crappy parts but like getting business from the insurance companies. Then you take your car to a real repair shop, show them a picture of the duck boat that mauled your car, and they give you the real estimate which is larger than the insurance company's by a factor of 5.
The important part of the story is that I don't have a car for three weeks. I'm using zipcars to get to Boeing Field, which, by the way, was the reason I bought Jessica to begin with. So I wouldn't have to rent zipcars to get to the airport. But, again, I'm not in the hospital.
That reminds me though. I'd like to share an experience I've had while driving in the city of Seattle, so I spent about 20 minutes drawing this diagram:
Do you notice anything completely nonsensical about this intersection? Like maybe the force right turn where there are no one-way streets involved? Ladies and Gentlemen, this is a real intersection in Seattle. In fact, I dealt with this and two other similar intersections last night on my way back to drop off the zip car. There is no reason for this. It wasn't a big intersection, just two two-lane roads...intersecting. I was in the lucky lane that was forced to turn right when I actually needed to turn left. There was a cop there, so I turned right and drove a block out of my way and made my third u-turn for the night. Its as if the people designing the roads knew where I needed to go, and put all their unecessary limitations on that path of travel.
When I got here I was a bit starry-eyed and thought everyone here was pretty cool and smart. They're not. Nothing about this city appears to be well designed. In fact, the next time you see me remind me to bring my sectional so I can complain about the airspace here. But I digress.
I have a theory. It has little to no basis on facts, and is built on ignorance and assumptions, however, if a bunch of gay bloggers can make up ridiculous conspiracy theories about Amazon, I'm pretty confident I can say whatever I want about this city's governance. You see, we don't like cars here. We, as in the stupid hippies that "run things." Because we don't like cars, we try to do a bunch of things to make it really inconvenient to have one. For example, we design every parking garage in the city to have spaces sized for a small motorcycle, so that when a bunch of pretentious SUVs get parked there, everyone basically has to kind of open their door an inch and slide in and out of their car without choking on their own window. Then make all these bus lanes and bus-only bridges and intersections where only the busses go straight. Or we take roads like say...2nd and 3rd avenue, and make them one way (one way for cars only, not busses) but only during certain times of the day, like 6am to 9:30am and 5pm to 6:30pm, and all the roads on either size degrade into ridiculous mazes, so every unsuspecting driver who gets caught there will turn off and get caught in all kinds of ridiculous traffic during the unwanted detour.
However, we don't really offer anything to replace the cars with. Apparently, packing yourself onto a gas guzzling bus with a bunch of sketchy people is morally superior to driving a gas guzzling car. But we don't want people to have trains or anything. At least, not ones that go anywhere.
There is a monorail here. It goes roughly half a mile. According to some friends in a bar, the city spent 90 million on it, and then some dick living on the west side kept collecting signatures to vote on canceling the project, and it went to vote 9 times before the monorail project got canned. We have a bunch of bridges here with way to much traffic, and the highways in general rival Phillys 76 (which I didn't think was possible), but we can't get trains in and out because for some strange reason people keep voting them down. I don't really know what they vote for around here. I kind of want to register to vote here just so I go and vote no for everything.
We do have a light rail. Based on personal obervation, light rail means "small an inefficient train." The trains go through the bus tunnels, which I guess are actually just a subway now that real trains are going through. Well, except that the busses also go through the tunnels still. And someone, somewhere, made this rule that busses and trains cannot both be in the terminal at the same time, so both the busses and trains often have to wait at the threshold of a station while the other type departs. This means that you'll be on the train and you'll here "now arriving at westlake" and the trains stops and you stand up and look out through the windows at the walls of the tunnel.
The trains themselves are shiny, way shorter than a Philly subway train, and have a pathetic capacity. Imagine if someone sat down with you, handed you a piece of paper, and told you to design a train that held as few people as possible. That's how I think these trains got designed. You would think that if you got on a train, you would see maybe rows of chairs to sit on. Seattle's light rail trains instead actaully contain a number of walls, with a few seats tucked in here or there just so no one gets confused and thinks they're in a hallway. They go slightly faster than a bus.
Also, I am clearly in the minority of people who are bothered by this. The other people who live here seem to think that Seattle is awesome. In fact, some people that I've talked to actually moved here first, and then tried to find a job. They weren't just lured here by money. As in, they came here because they somehow thought Seattle was cool before they moved here. I'm not sure what's so great...annd...I probably shouldn't share this journal with any of them. I think our difference of opinion be a result of a difference in our definitions of awesome. When I think of "awesome" I usually think of me being the only male player on an all-female volleyball team. When other people think of "awesome" they seem to think of beer that isn't quite good enough to be sold more than 25 miles away from where its made. To each his own, I guess.
Thursday, August 6, 2009
In Seattle, the Duck Rides You
Seattle, as does Philly, has at least one tour service that uses amphibious vehicles that drive on land and also go in the water. They are called Ride-the-Duck, and one of their land routes goes right by my apartment. Now, I honestly wish I was about to tell you some funny story about them almost running me over, or a cute girl falling out of the boat, or something. But thats not what happened. No, the stupid ------- boat actually ran me over today.
I was at the light at the corner of my apartment building, either stopped or stopping because it was red. I don't quite remember which, because my memory of that time period is overshadowed by the feeling of being hit from behind. By a boat. It actually hit me once--a nice love tap that woke me up and destroyed the park bench spoiler and pre-shattered the rear window. After riding a motorcycle for a few years, I've started to talk up my ability to see things coming and get out of the way in time. I did not see this coming. I don't even know where it came from. I mean, I knew there was one on the street. I think I passed it halfway down the block. I was stopped too close behind another car, so even if I could see the boat coming I still wouldn't have been able to get off the road in time. But I digress. There's more.
After the initial impact, during which I became both annoyed and incredulous that someone driving a big boat would rear end me...there was a second impact. I don't know what he was doing. Maybe he hit the gas. But the hull of the boat was actually making headway over my shrinking vehicle, and I became genuinely alarmed. Then the light turned green and I punched the throttle to get out of there, but it didn't really matter as the guy had found the brake pedal by that time anyway. If he hadn't, Jessica (my car) would probably be in a lot worse shape.
The guy, and some kind of captain/shift manager/wing commander-like guy who showed up a few minutes later, both apologized repeatedly without admiting fault. I was terse. I elected not to scream "WHAT THE !@#$ WERE YOU DOING?" which turned out to be a good choice, as there was a boatload of tourists snapping pictures of me and my crushed baby. I'm pretty sure it was their fault. I took a picture of the car in front of the duck ride in case anything goes even more wrong, though.
Thankfully the damage was all body damage, as far as I can tell. The engine, which is probably most of the cost, and the drivetrain and axles are all fine. Unthankfully, all of the damage was to my car. The boat appeared to have a thick, solid, unscratched metal surface.
I didn't call the police because I could still drive it, and I didn't want to sit around waiting for them to show up because I was actually on-call for work, which meant I needed to answer pages within 15 minutes or answer to my boss. So I just drove it in the gate of my building and spent half an hour cleaning glass shards off of and around Jessica. It is actually not terribly damaged. The tastefully ostentatious spoiler is sitting in the back seat, and the back window is now located in shards in a carboard box. Her trunk has gashes from the boats hull, but after cleaning it up it doesnt look too bad.
I'm just glad I'm not in the E.R. right now. Although, that would give me another shot at getting a cute nurses number. I've had nurse friends tell me that happens to them all the time in the E.R. in a tone of voice that suggested they found it annoying. I don't really care anymore. Girls who don't want to be hit on can just go live on another planet.
In other news, I just tried to print something from my web browser on my computer running Ubuntu Linux. I've actually recently upgraded Ubuntu, and it gave me a new version of the Firefox web browser. Apparently people who use this new and exciting version almost never need to change the margins when they print. I spent 20 minutes alternatively messing around with Firefox and searching the internet until I discovered the secret mouse-based incantations necessary to print with such nonstandard heathen margins that aren't a quarter inch. It actually brought back memories of using windows. Remember when you wanted to change some simple setting in windows, and to do it you had to use the mouse and open this graphical program, and then go into another window, maybe a tab, then use some non-intuitive interface to enter a value and probably restart the computer? I think my Ubuntu desktop is going to be like that soon.
Hmm...I just realized we have some kind of new light rail sytem in Seattle, and I might have to use it tomorrow to get to work. This could be interesting, as it sounds like they've tried to make paying your fare as complicated as possible.
I was at the light at the corner of my apartment building, either stopped or stopping because it was red. I don't quite remember which, because my memory of that time period is overshadowed by the feeling of being hit from behind. By a boat. It actually hit me once--a nice love tap that woke me up and destroyed the park bench spoiler and pre-shattered the rear window. After riding a motorcycle for a few years, I've started to talk up my ability to see things coming and get out of the way in time. I did not see this coming. I don't even know where it came from. I mean, I knew there was one on the street. I think I passed it halfway down the block. I was stopped too close behind another car, so even if I could see the boat coming I still wouldn't have been able to get off the road in time. But I digress. There's more.
After the initial impact, during which I became both annoyed and incredulous that someone driving a big boat would rear end me...there was a second impact. I don't know what he was doing. Maybe he hit the gas. But the hull of the boat was actually making headway over my shrinking vehicle, and I became genuinely alarmed. Then the light turned green and I punched the throttle to get out of there, but it didn't really matter as the guy had found the brake pedal by that time anyway. If he hadn't, Jessica (my car) would probably be in a lot worse shape.
The guy, and some kind of captain/shift manager/wing commander-like guy who showed up a few minutes later, both apologized repeatedly without admiting fault. I was terse. I elected not to scream "WHAT THE !@#$ WERE YOU DOING?" which turned out to be a good choice, as there was a boatload of tourists snapping pictures of me and my crushed baby. I'm pretty sure it was their fault. I took a picture of the car in front of the duck ride in case anything goes even more wrong, though.
Thankfully the damage was all body damage, as far as I can tell. The engine, which is probably most of the cost, and the drivetrain and axles are all fine. Unthankfully, all of the damage was to my car. The boat appeared to have a thick, solid, unscratched metal surface.
I didn't call the police because I could still drive it, and I didn't want to sit around waiting for them to show up because I was actually on-call for work, which meant I needed to answer pages within 15 minutes or answer to my boss. So I just drove it in the gate of my building and spent half an hour cleaning glass shards off of and around Jessica. It is actually not terribly damaged. The tastefully ostentatious spoiler is sitting in the back seat, and the back window is now located in shards in a carboard box. Her trunk has gashes from the boats hull, but after cleaning it up it doesnt look too bad.
I'm just glad I'm not in the E.R. right now. Although, that would give me another shot at getting a cute nurses number. I've had nurse friends tell me that happens to them all the time in the E.R. in a tone of voice that suggested they found it annoying. I don't really care anymore. Girls who don't want to be hit on can just go live on another planet.
In other news, I just tried to print something from my web browser on my computer running Ubuntu Linux. I've actually recently upgraded Ubuntu, and it gave me a new version of the Firefox web browser. Apparently people who use this new and exciting version almost never need to change the margins when they print. I spent 20 minutes alternatively messing around with Firefox and searching the internet until I discovered the secret mouse-based incantations necessary to print with such nonstandard heathen margins that aren't a quarter inch. It actually brought back memories of using windows. Remember when you wanted to change some simple setting in windows, and to do it you had to use the mouse and open this graphical program, and then go into another window, maybe a tab, then use some non-intuitive interface to enter a value and probably restart the computer? I think my Ubuntu desktop is going to be like that soon.
Hmm...I just realized we have some kind of new light rail sytem in Seattle, and I might have to use it tomorrow to get to work. This could be interesting, as it sounds like they've tried to make paying your fare as complicated as possible.
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