Everything Shall be Broken!

I had a miserable time in bed last night. I still feel... bloated despite eating lots of vegetables and whole grains that are supposed to help with that sort of thing, but that's not the real problem (this time).

No, it's because I caught the cold my sister and her family had, which seems to be going around. I'd feel worse about showing up at the meet Sunday if everyone there wasn't already coughing and sniffling. Work is the same, with a few people calling in sick instead. My body's doing its normal 'pretend that everything's okay during work hours, then hit with a vengeance around 9pm' thing. I was burning up in bed, or shivering hard enough to make my teeth chatter if I let any bit of me peek out from under the covers. I also needed to blow my nose about every half hour... none of this really helped me sleep.

So, this morning, although the cold symptoms *per se* are toned down, I feel totally zombied. x.x

Also, NWN2 crashed, twice, in different conversation cutscenes. I guess I need to start saving more often. At least as long as I'm keeping the apartment as warm as I've been; my video-card's been known to crash like that if it overheats.

Snow in Bellevue, eh? How's that working out?

I live two miles from work. It shouldn't take me an hour to get home.

Once again, the line of backed up traffic started on level P2 of the parking garage. This is always a bad sign, and if I hadn't had a cold I probably would have just parked as soon as I saw it and walked home. But I do have a cold, and the prospect of stumbling through the snow and ice and freezing temperatures... seemed like a bad idea.

So, at first, it seemed to be going okay. The plan today was to power through the traffic on my normal route, instead of trying to be sneaky, since 'sneaky' had ended up taking about 90 minutes the last time I'd tried. And at first it was working -- even though other traffic had the right of way, they were being nice and treating it as a four-way stop, so we were making progress...

...until the light stopped turning green. For twenty minutes (and believe me, I was checking the time), the huuuuuge long line of cars, with branches and tributaries stretching back out of sight, didn't get a green. The only progress we made was when the car in front said 'the heck with it' and turned right on red.

There was also some heavy machinery from the construction site merging into traffic ahead of me, but that wasn't nearly as much of a delay as the broken fucking light. Basically, it looked like whenever a pedestrian decided to cross the street and pushed the button, we'd get skipped, and lots of people were walking home.

At any rate, eventually the greens started coming again, and for a while I was making good progress. Sure, it was 40 minutes after I'd left work, but... oh, wait, the little side road I usually go down had a *line* on it? A line at the *top* of the hill? That can't be right...

It turned out it was the line for the exciting new thrill ride, the automobile slalom! See, this little twisty road is usually pretty low traffic, and twisty, and STEEP downhill, with an s-curve on the hill, so it wasn't too surprising that someone had screwed up and plowed into the sidewalk. Three someones, actually. Or that someone else had sideswiped another car while trying to pass because they thought they were going too slow. Or that four cars and a motorcycle just weren't able to actually make progress uphill going the other direction, so they were stopped in the lack-of-shoulder with their blinkers on. I counted ten cars blocking the way, leaving one last narrow avenue for traffic to flow, which had to be shared between two lines of cars at opposite ends that couldn't SEE each other because of the turns.

At least it was fast, though. Maybe five minutes to wind my way through the mess at very low speeds (because the whole road was snowy and slick, and my Honda's performance on snow is best described as 'hovercraft') and then of course traffic past the blockage was fairly light, although I still had to drive pretty slowly to avoid spinning out.

Then I got home and realized I'd left the windows open. This is bad, because the thermostat in the apartment doesn't go low enoug to not run the heaters full blast if you leave a window open in the winter. Reeeally not looking forward to this month's electricity bill now. v.v