Tag: commute

Impending Doom

The last post talked about trusting my instincts. A big part of me is wishing I hadn’t written that because for most of this morning my instinct has been telling me that today is going to be a really shitty day.

Why?

I don’t know.

It’s the day before Thanksgiving and I am working in the office. The office alone sort of points to a bad day, but it’s more than that. In the United States, the day before Thanksgiving is traditionally the busiest travel day of the year. Everyone in the country hits the road on this day each year. I expected my morning commute to be an absolute nightmare. Add to the expected gridlock that it was pouring rain outside and it would be safe to assume that the traffic would be a gridlocked nightmare times 10. Nope. There was no traffic at all. Everyone drove a little slower than the speed limit thanks to the rain, but I never had to hit the breaks once over the entire 40-something mile drive. You would think that would ease my sense of impending doom, but nope. Somehow it made it worse.

Today should be a quiet day at work. If the office is anything to go by, it’s dead as can be here. I only see two other people and they both work for me. Weird. I should be feeling optimistic and excited about the coming holiday weekend, but instead I am just dreading everything. Once I get home tonight and see my beloved bride again, I will start feeling really good about the weekend, but until then?

It’s going to be a long, sucky, painful day.

83/365
83/365

Good Morning

I got up early this morning because it’s an in the office morning (hopefully not a full day, that would be tomorrow) and I needed to get all of my morning routine stuff done extra early.

When I got out of bed I saw this scene. This pic was taken with the iPhone’s low light mode, which is why it looks a little funky colored. The only light in the room was far away and purple.

82/365
82/365

I got a second shot a few minutes later when Jen got up and turned on the bathroom light.

If that doesn’t make your heart feel all warm and fuzzy early on a Tuesday morning then nothing will. I’m 80-something miles away from home now. Hopefully I’ll get to go home at lunch time and finish the work day there. Tomorrow is the official work-in-the-office day, so I’ll be there for the full day. Let’s see how it goes.

The Evening Commute Blues

I still have an hour and 20 minutes to go before I can head home from the office. Unfortunately I saw a news report that states one of the highways I sometimes take home is closed in both directions.

Shit.

Tanker truck carrying ‘several thousand gallons of fuel’ overturns on Route 3 north of Boston

That means that everyone heading in my direction is going to have one major highway option taken away from them, which means that we’re all going to take the same route, which means that the already brutal evening traffic is going to be 100% worse than normal.

Oh goody gumdrops. I could go North for 40 miles or so, but maybe today would be faster to go South and circumnavigate the globe. Just call me Ferdinand Friggin’ Magellan.

I Don’t Wanna Go

Tomorrow is Wednesday.

Wednesday is my day in the office.

Therefore tomorrow is my day in the office.

I don’t wanna go. I wanna work from home. I don’t wanna commute. I don’t want the sun to go down an hour before I have to drive home.

I know I’m whining like a spoiled little brat but I don’t care. I’m sleepy and I don’t wanna drive 40 miles to work in the morning.

That’s just the way it is, folks.

Sky

I have the Hipstamatic App set to save off an unfiltered copy of each photo it takes. The sky looked cool over the highway during my morning commute today so I snapped a pic. This is a rare occurrence of the unfiltered pic being better than the filtered pic, in my humble opinion at least.

No hipstamatic filter or square crop
Hipstamatic filter and square crop

Then again… maybe the filtered one is better than I thought. I don’t know. What does it all mean? Does it even matter?

Tuesday Morning

Wednesdays are my commute to the office days, but this week I have an in-person meeting on Tuesday as well. Here I sit, in the office.

The commute was okay, but a little exciting. My car told me my gas tank had about 97 miles worth of gas left in it. My GPS told me the office was 73 miles away (today’s meeting is not in my regular building, it’s much farther away). I did the complex math in my head and decided not to stop for gas.

All through the drive I kept updating that very complicated mathematical equation to make sure I was still going to get to the building without running out of gas, and hopefully also have enough gas left over to get me to a gas station when I leave. Everything worked out. My car was yelling at me to fill-‘er-up by the time I parked, but outside of that… success.

The only downside of the trip is that I gave myself a couple of errands to run before I left the house, and I got them all done… but I forgot it’s Tuesday and not Wednesday and I forgot to put the trash barrel out on the street. Ugh. It’s okay, there wasn’t much in it this week, but who knows how it will look next week. Wish me luck, folks.

Super Frustrating Day

Ugh, what a day.

The two hour drive to work made me half an hour late so I stayed an extra half an hour to make up for it. That got me on the road a little after 6:00pm. The drive home took an hour and 15 minutes. That’s not uncommon, but on top of the two hours and 10 minutes this morning was just painful. Sitting there stopped in traffic on route 93 North at 7:00pm? What the fuck.

That, on top of my beloved dad rock cover band officially coming apart today just made a suck day suck more.

Here’s some rehearsal recordings from a few tapes I made over the years. I’ve posted this playlist before, probably a few times. I don’t care. The three of us who remain in the band are going to start over from scratch. New singer, new songs, new name. All of that. I guess I am just feeling a little overwhelmed by stupid shit tonight.

Again I say, ugh.

Two Hours and 10 Minutes

The distance between my home and my office building is 40 miles.

The drive to work today took two hours and 10 minutes.

Un-friggin’-believable.

I followed the traffic avoidance route generated by the Waze app. I feel I may have been in err, as it turned out.

Anyway, here is the house I am going to buy when we hit the gajillion dollar lottery some day. It’s near Minuteman National Park in Concord, MA.

In the Office Day: Monday Edition

Wednesday is the official work-in-the-office day, but this week I’m bumping it up to Monday. The traffic was bad, but normal bad. It wasn’t 2+ hours like last week, it was just the usual 80 minutes for 40 mile bullshit today.

I parked as close to the back entrance as you can get without actually parking on the back entrance. Sweet.

Traffic Nightmare

40 mile drive today took about 130 minutes. Yeah, that fucking makes sense. Must have been the first day back in the office after Labor Day. Gridlock nightmare from hell, right on fucking queue. Suffice to say if I were working from home today I would not have wasted over two hours of my life sitting in fucking traffic.

CIMG7529