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congestion and rain
Sunday, May 3 2009
setting: Silver Spring, Montgomery County, Maryland
At some point this afternoon Gretchen and I were packed up and ready to go. The dogs had jumped into our car early in the packing process and now refused to leave, either not wanting to get left behind or hoping, by their presence alone, to hurry the process of our departure.
It rained for most of our northward drive today, not ending until somewhere on the New York Thruway. Traffic congestion was also bad. It started somewhere in Eastern Maryland and didn't let up until about halfway up New Jersey. I drove for about a third of the road trip, but because I drove in a middle shift during the worst of the congestion, I only took us through about 50 of the 310 miles. On the plus side, the Baby never vomited or needed use of a litter box for the entire drive, though this time I'd placed a litter box in her favorite foot well.
Gretchen's folks, bless their hearts, don't really understand coffee. Comprehending the subtleties of coffee the way I do is as generational as rock and roll or hip-hop-based nu metal. People older than fifty think one way about coffee and people younger than that think something else. Part of it might also be related to the Jewish cultural phenomenon of non-deliberate indulgence-avoidance. In the morning, Gretchen's father either makes a pot of decaf or reheats day-old caffeinated coffee, imagining it to be "just as good" as fresh coffee (it definitely isn't). By the time I'd left Silver Spring this morning, I'd had one cup of reheated real coffee and two cups of decaf. I needed something a little more substantial. So I bought a cup at the Silver Spring Exxon station and refilled it (or had it refilled) twice along the route north. The I-95 megalopolitan rest stops were unexpectedly crowded today, and both Gretchen and I found that the easiest way to obtain coffee was to just march up to the Roy Rogers coffee pot and refill my travel mug. There were no lines and no one was asking to be paid.
Back at our house, our weekend houseguests had left us some Blue Moon Belgian Wheat beers (a non-union Coors product) as well as a plastic model woman having transparent layers such that her internal organs could be seen.
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