Arctangential

Hey, something happened to me!

I was driving to the grocery store, on the highway portion of the trip. I was in the middle lane, a big 18 wheeler was to my right, and a couple of cars to my left. We were all going maybe 70, 75, as is normal for that stretch of road.

Suddenly something goes “bonk” against my windshield and then flies away. I looked, but it hadn’t left a mark or anything. Just as I was about to discount it as nothing, it happened again. *bonk*. And then a few more times. *bonkbonkbonk*. Then stuff started going under my tires and I was having trouble steering, stuff was bouncing off my hood, things were generally bad. Then I realized what was going on — one of the tires on the semi truck ahead of me was disintegrating before my eyes. As it did so, the pieces of rubber were quite happily bombarding my small car.

I’ll admit it, I panicked. My first instinct was to go left, but of course there were cars there, so I couldn’t. I didn’t really relish the idea of speeding up any more, and I also wasn’t sure if the truck was going to start swerving, so going forward wasn’t really an option, so I started slowing down. The cars on the left were passing me as I slowed down, so I was making progress towards getting to the left, but for some reason I wasn’t getting any farther away from the rubber-chunk spewing truck. Of course, it was slowing down too, and we were doing so at basically the same rate.

Rubber continued to attack my car, *bonk-bonkbonk* and suchlike, until finally I got an opening to move left, and did so. As soon as I did, the rubber rain ceased. I hit the gas and was well ahead of the truck in no time, which had managed to pull over by the time it faded from my rear-view mirror.

The car seemed to be driving fine, so I just drove the rest of the way to the grocery store. When I got out to inspect the damage, I found that there was none. In fact, the only evidence that my car had been so barraged were a multitude of small streaks in the dust which perpetually shrouds my car. So, no damage done.

It was kind of exciting though.

I really only have one thing to say.

I haven’t updated in a while, for the simple reason that I couldn’t think of anything to say that wasn’t terribly repetitive.

BUY ME THIS.

I was at lunch today with some of my colleagues and the conversation turned to spoilers and other such car stupidities. Being the braggadocio that I am, I of course had to relate my story of the SUV spoiler. There was laughter. Someone suggested the obviously ludicrous idea of putting a spoiler on a pickup truck. There was more laughter.

Maybe a half hour after we got back to work, one of the aforementioned colleagues called me excitedly to the window to see something. Lo and behold, parked in the lot across the street was a shiny white pickup truck sporting one of these. Before today, I had not known that such a thing existed. After today, my opinion of the human race has decreased yet one more notch — a feat I had thought not possible.

In other news, moving is basically done — I now have one apartment with nothing but furniture, and another apartment with all of my small-sized possessions, all of which are sitting in piles on the floor. It’s a fun life.

Yay for a new computer.

Boo for having to fuck with Gnome libraries for a year just to get LogJam installed.

Yay for 8 times more disk space.

Boo for spending 4 *hours* fucking with Gnome libraries.

Yay for 6 times faster CD-RW — ripping a CD went from 30 minutes to 12 minutes. (3 times faster).

Boo to the Gnome people, who seem to take joy in actively hiding library distributions from me.

I’m sure this annoyance will end soon enough, but right now I’m kind of pissy, I guess.

As for the moving, it’s going very well — I have internet in my new place already, and most of my stuff is over there. In face, I’m moving too quickly. I have 11 days until the movers come, and only about 2 or 3 trips worth of stuff to take over, and most of it is stuff I want to take over as late as possible, since I don’t really want to be living without it. So I’m on a moving hiatus right now.