Note to the person in front of me earlier in the silver Honda Civic with Maryland tags: there is such a thing as going too slow on a snowy road. Moron. Damned make-me-come-to-a-complete-stop-and-lose-my-momentum-and-then-have-to-zig-zag-up-the-hill moron. Five more miles per hour at the base of the hill, buddy, and you'd have made it just fine, and so would I.
So I went to work today ... for an hour. I was later getting out of the house than I expected, and then Tino wanted to go Christmas shopping and I'd had plans to do the same -- only not quite so early -- so I discovered the person I really needed to see wasn't there, sent an email to get something else done, and bailed.
It had started to snow in earnest right when I got to work (around noon, if you must know), and there wasn't any buildup when we left Reston. We hit a couple stores I won't name and then the mall, since I needed to get sunglasses (failed) and a tie bar (failed), and was looking for some luggage (passed, contingent on us crossing the street to the other mall). We left around five, discovering in the process that quite a bit of snow had fallen in the time since we left work.
And the way to the other mall was a parking lot. So we bailed, and it took us a half hour to get from the back of the Galleria to the Toll Road, which was at least moving when we got to it. The traffic, that is. Not the road itself. Synecdoche.
Once back in Reston, we hit a couple more also-not-to-be-named stores and went back to the house. I note that at that point it was after seven, and I still had
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No sunglasses,
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No tie bar (it seems that no stores have them anymore except for a chintzy selection at JCPenney),
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No luggage.
We talked a bit at the house, and Nicole and Tino bickered about dinner (as they are wont to do) and eventually we all piled in the car.
It being nine by that point, and me still needing luggage (and hoping for a tie bar, the sunglasses by that point being a lost cause), I bailed on dinner, drove back to Tysons, hit the Galleria, and discovered:
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Macy's was open till eleven,
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They have tie bars
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The bags available at the other luggage store, the purpose of the trip, ended up being not better than the one I could have bought earlier in the day, but they had that one too and I was able to make the side-by-side comparison.
To make matters even better, the tie bar I bought was cheaper than marked (probably on closeout, as stores have apparently decided that tie bars are gauche, especially gauging by the reaction of the salesmen at Nieman Marcus).
Ran into a cow orker at one of those not-to-be-named stores, and it turns out they released everybody at four anyway. I'm not as much of a slacker as it might at first have appeared. Now to check my work email and see if I got results ...
link
(19 dec)
(Seen in the back window of a car with a Nader sticker)
I'm not normally one to read
The Nation but this cracked me up.
link
(22:59 EST, Tuesday, 19 December 2000.)
By my count, he's only got to come up with 2.4 billion dollars extra in order to cover that shortfall. The sad thing is, the guy who heads that committee is an old friend of his in a buddy appointment, and even he thinks that the Governor is out of his mind when it comes to transportation.
link
(22:52 EST, Tuesday, 19 December 2000.)
NASA actually puts up a whole bunch of cool stuff on that site, but somebody sent this link, and then right after I finished letterboxing and resampling the image to use as wallpaper, I found out my evil twin had also adopted it.
So in the interest of sharing, the resampled image (1024x768, letterboxed with a dark indigo background) is
here for download.
For desktop colors, I recommend something with a 1x1x2 RGB ratio.
link
(10:28 EST, Tuesday, 19 December 2000.)
