pet peeve of the day

I'm on my way to meet my friend Mel for our usual Tuesday/Thursday morning run and, as I approach the light to turn into campus, I discover someone has pulled into the right lane and decided to go straight, preventing me (and all the people behind me) from turning. Now this is one of those roads that goes to two lanes about 150 yards before the light, so it's not like this person had been cruising in the right lane for miles and just happened to get to the light. No. This person made a conscious decision to get over. And it's not like this is an intersection where people turning right is a rarity - it's the fricking university...at 7:40 in the morning. There's a steady stream of people turning right! Well, there's usually a steady stream of people turning right. Today, there was a big long line of people WAITING to turn right.

Seriously, folks - if you're coming to a somewhat heavily used intersection and you feel like you want to be in the right lane, please wait until after the light. You will have plenty of time to get over later.

Thank you.

TWC

Okay, I think I have a problem - I've become a huge weather nerd. I'm not sure how it happened. It started innocently enough - checking the weather every morning like a normal person so I could see what clothing would be weather-appropriate. Then I moved to North Carolina (home of the weirdest weather on earth) and the insanity began. First it was ice storms, then hurricanes, then more ice storms, rain harder than I've ever seen before (seriously - I don't understand how it can rain this much at once), more hurricanes. I think it started with the fear (Is that hurricane really going to hit us?) and then became fascination as I saw the predicted path change on a daily basis.

From there, I discovered that on weather underground (www.wunderground.com), they publish the results of hurricane tracking computer models, so I started checking those daily as well. Then I spent enough time doing this that I began to understand the forecast discussions they publish on the noaa.gov site... If that wasn't bad enough, I discovered that you can get up to date raw data sent from weather buoys scattered all over the world!!! I actually watched as hurricane Ivan passed by buoy 42040 (well, that one only delivers data on an hourly basis, but still...) It was so exciting!!!

Now I have a sort of strange attraction to The Weather Channel's Jim Cantore... I think I may need therapy!

the RNC

Here's my my new favorite bit of wisdom from the Republican National Convention (courtesy of Dave Barry):

"In dangerous situations, you always want to be with a cartoonist, because if something bad happens, he can draw a funny picture of it."

Cheers to that.