Things that might be decidedly odd…

Traffic

Fuck these assholes and their bullshit!

Both University and Montlake Bridges are up for most of today so that the idle rich (i.e., people with tall sailboats) can float between Lake Union and Lake Washington with ease. Meanwhile, the rest of us are jammed up in horrible weekend traffic as everybody has to reroute to the I-5 ship canal bridge. It took me about 40 minutes to drive to and 30 minutes to drive back from University Village (less than 5 miles from my apartment) to get my phone fixed.

I totally missed my appointment because of the traffic, but the girl at the store was really nice in squeezing me in after realizing the next open appointment wasn’t until 3 (this was at about 12:30). My name got called almost immediately after I was told to wait for an opening. I showed the Mac Genius the problem with the top of my touchscreen and she said she would exchange my phone then and there. Even with the paperwork and SIM chip swap, I was in and out of there in less than 15 minutes with a brand new iPhone. Impressive.

Bugs, Bridges and Movies

After staying up late last night because I couldn’t sleep (I did get about 2 hours of work done in the end), I got up fairly late this morning. By the time I got to work, the parking garage was full. Now, I’ve come in late before, but there were always a few spaces available on the bottom floor on the far end of the building. However, today there was nothing. I drove around a few nearby parking lots and garages before I found a space under the conference center. Actually, it wasn’t a bad location at all, but I just spent a lot of time finding it.

Work went well though. Having started off with about 24 at the start of the day, I was down to 8 (6 really, since 2 were done but I need to wait for the nightly build to finish to verify them) by the time I left at 10pm. I probably fixed or forwarded more bugs in one day than I ever have before. Of course having so few bugs means more will shortly be coming my way, but that’s fine–it’s good to be busy (but not too busy).

The drive home was a bit longer than usual. High winds apparently damaged the Evergreen Point floating bridge (the longest floating bridge in the world) that carries SR520 from the east side over to Seattle. WSDOT consequently shut the bridge down while it’s being repaired. Earlier in the day, I’m sure traffic was an absolute nightmare, but because I stayed so late the only extra time incurred was for the detour itself (I-405 to I-90 to I-5 over another very long floating bridge). Hopefully the bridge will be back open tomorrow morning, but if not traffic’s gonna be terrible. I’ve contemplated working from home or at least not going in until well after rush hour is over.

The scary thing is that Washington state has a history of its floating bridges sinking. The sinking or otherwise failure of the Evergreen Point bridge would make an already bad traffic situation much, much worse. One thing I like about living and working here is that work in the burbs and home in the city are only about 12 miles away from each other. In the Bay Area, if you want to work in the valley and live in the city, the distance is really too far without having a nightmarish commute. In the end it’s the bridges over the lake that make my short and usually trouble free commute possible. Washington is the proud home of no less than 4 of the longest floating bridges in the world. At the same time though, they seem to have a lot of problems with ships passing (Evergreen is a draw bridge, which occasionally shuts down to let ships pass), high winds or aquatic disturbances not faced by suspension bridges. Perhaps in other places there aren’t floating bridges because they’ve built other kinds instead. It does make me wonder why here there are so many floating bridges. I suppose it’s a question of cost, construction time and technical feasibility. Then again, this is also the home state of the infamous Tacoma Narrows suspension bridge.

Upon arriving back home, I started watching my latest from Netflix, Harold and Maude. Now, I’d never seen this movie and truthfully I was a little skeptical of the romantic comedy nature of it. Usually I don’t like those kinds of movies, but this one was wacky and off-beat enough that I really enjoyed it. Delightful for sure.