Patterico's Pontifications

1/27/2011

On Why I Haven’t Been Posting Today…

Filed under: General — Aaron Worthing @ 2:29 pm



[Guest post by Aaron Worthing; if you have tips, please send them here.]

My experience in the Nor’easter hasn’t been this bad, but still, here’s an account:

About 6:15 p.m., Steve Roberts, 42, began to merge his Dodge Ram pickup onto the George Washington Parkway en route to Sterling. Two hours later, he was still waiting to merge.

“I hear there’s an accident up by the parkway and 495, and that’s blocking everything up,” said Roberts, who began his commute at the Pentagon. “I’ve got a long way before I get home.”

Denise Borders spent nearly 13 grueling hours on the Parkway – “just sitting for hours. Literally. Sitting, not moving” – without food, without a bathroom, without sleep. There were trees down and people whose cars got stuck trying to turn around and get off the parkway, Borders said. But for most of the drivers on the road, the snow was less of a problem than the complete gridlock that enveloped them.

“You saw people get out and have to relieve themselves out in the street. It was horrible,” [A.W.: Well, at least it melted some of it.]  Borders said after finally arriving at her home in Reston, close to 5:30 a.m.

Power lines were down, systems were down.  Oh, and I had a sh-tload of work to do, mainly on the internet.  Oh, and as if all of that wasn’t bad enough, my father-in-law is in the hospital for heart issues.  And I am sick.  And morons were needlessly trying to go out.

Anyway, for now the storm has passed, both metaphorically and literally.  I am probably not going to be able to do a lot tonight, but I will see what I can do.  And Friday should be a lot better.

[Posted and authored by Aaron Worthing.]

23 Responses to “On Why I Haven’t Been Posting Today…”

  1. Los Angeles County has been nowhere near as bad. A few weeks ago, I was attempting to drive a friend to his home over Highway 14. I got most of the way there, and traffic slowed to a crawl as snow fell. After an hour, I made it to the next exit, and told my friend I was arbitrarily deciding to turn around and head back.
    I thought briefly about finishing the trip on the Sierra Highway, but opted for something with traction instead.

    The fellow I felt sorry for was two cars ahead of me. His car was marked “Emergency blood delivery”. He, I figure, had a legitimate need to be out in that mess.

    Karl (ff486c)

  2. Let me guess…Elliot in the Morning with his high pitched annoying fake laugh?

    mr pink (1f4b05)

  3. It took me 3 and a half hours to get home when it normally takes me 15 minutes.

    mr pink (1f4b05)

  4. mr. pink

    no, it was in the afternoon, yesterday. someone paired up with chili?

    Aaron Worthing (73a7ea)

  5. Where are those child’s parents? They should be given a long time out!!

    MD in Philly (3d3f72)

  6. If it’s any consolation, one time I got caught in the middle of a blizzard here (the forecasters completely missed it), and didn’t get home for six hours, even though I was less than 20 miles from home. Saw many people having to leave their cars in the middle of the expressway, having run out of fuel. I had to slam my way off the expressway in order to relieve myself, and since it was after 1 AM at this point, nothing was open. Had to find an alley in a dangerous neighborhood, and no more will be said about that unfortunate incident.

    Dmac (498ece)

  7. Don’t worry about it, A.W. – it doesn’t sound like you’ll be able to take a “breather”, per se, but you’ve certainly earned one with all the work you’ve put into this place recently. We’re certainly not going to hold anything like this against you. Prayers for your father in law.

    re: that awesome picture – soccer fans are the best.

    Leviticus (58d125)

  8. My commute is 30 minutes, I left at 3:12 from my work 4 hours later I will still only 1/2 way home with no hope of getting any closer in Herndon, I pulled off, got a hotel room and watched the horror on the local news. It still took me 1.5hrs this morning after checking out which should have taken 15 minutes. MD, DC, VA all knew this was coming and yet the roads were not pretreated for the ice that came first followed by the 10inches of snow. It is ALWAYS the ice that gets us.

    JadedByPolitics (d652e9)

  9. Nobody likes a whiner.

    daleyrocks (e7bc4f)

  10. Speaking selfishly, I hope things clear up in DC so you can get back to posting. Because…um…well, I guess it is a little bit about ME sometimes!:-)

    TimesDisliker (e0445b)

  11. The low tonight in Miami will be about 45F. Not rubbing it in, of course, but are you sure you can’t telecommute from Florida?

    Prayers for you, your father in law, and all the zhlubs who had leave their cars on the parkway. The Weather Channel was showing shots of the Geo. Wash. Parkway, with abandoned cars. The snowplows had cleared all the lanes around them, meaning those people will come back and still find their cars snowed in.

    kishnevi (41d602)

  12. 14″ here in Camden. About 2 hours of shoveling to get the walk done and cars dug out.

    And I AM SICK OF WINTER

    JEA (1c1445)

  13. Complete chaos back East … so its what? Six inches of snow?

    ** running and dodging **

    SPQR (26be8b)

  14. I guess it would be inappropriate to complain that it’s not even supposed to get into the 70s this weekend in L.A.?

    malclave (4f3ec1)

  15. Yeah…like 68 or so Saturday…brr. I think I might need to put on socks…maybe a hoodie in the morning when it is REALLY chilly.

    MunDane68 (54a83b)

  16. Sorry about the rough day. I got lucky yesterday that the metro didn’t shut down, as I was just across the street from the white house. My boss however, got stuck in traffic for 4 hours and ended up leaving her car on the road.

    Supposed to snow tomorrow, but I think before noon. Hope your day isn’t as bad.

    G (ce0c1b)

  17. The both of you can die in a fire…

    Metaphorically speaking, of course… 🙂

    Scott Jacobs (d027b8)

  18. Keep a stock off food worth eating even if you feel great. Learn to telecommute when you can. Go out to meet with neighbors while shoveling that white er “stuff”. Don’t bother trying to go shopping or anything like that. Get your socialization locally. Knowing your neighbors helps build “community spirit”, which can come in handy with politics. (Besides, it’s fun to rattle on about what I do and listen to the fascinating stories from people in entirely different lines of business. It helps prevent “in-bred-intellect-itis” disease.)

    I hope you get well simultaneously with the roads becoming passable. Sick is no fun. But so is sitting in stationary cannot get out of traffic for hours on end. (Or at least, carry an empty coffee can.)

    {^_-}

    jdow (98e9d7)

  19. The entire BaWa region refuses to retain the memory of snow from one season to the next. “What’s this white stuff descending from the heavens? Help!” Panic ensues. It’s like everyone thinks they live in Miami.

    Then come the salt trucks and dump a layer of rock an inch thicker than the actual snow. It’s always been like that.

    Mork (5eeee0)

  20. Part of the problem is the district’s decision, 40 years ago, to basically exempt itself from inclusion in the central city aspect of the Interstate Highway System, as was done with virtually every other major city in America (I-70 not going all the way through Baltimore and I-40 through Memphis are the only other exceptions I can think of).

    The gutless failure to complete I-95 through Washington means that even though the G.W. Parkway runs through Virginia, it’s not only the most direct limited access highway out of the main part of the capitol’s office area both for Northern Virgina traffic headed to the Sterling/Dulles/Leesburg area and the eastern parts of Tyson’s Corner, but it’s also the only limited access road for Montgomery County, Md. drivers commuting to and from downtown, who only have traffic controlled streets or the disjointed Cabin John Parkway, Chain Bridge Road and Whitehurst Freeway combo on the eastern shore of the Potomac as their other option to access the Beltway and the I-270 corridor.

    Forcing Virginia and Maryland traffic onto the G.W. Parkway — which is more similar to Robert Moses’ pre-WWII no-commerical-vehicles-allowed roads around NYC than it is to a modern limited access highway — means whenever there’s tie-up, you’re always going to get horrendous back-ups, because the road was never made for high-volume commuting, and — as with so many other things in modern life — the brains in the D.C. area exempted themselves from the rules and requirements for modern highways they mandated for cities in the rest of the nation. And the bigger the federal government bureaucracy grows, the more people will be living in the area, and the worse the problem will get, because there’s no place or no will to put in any relief highway(s).

    John (8dd4e7)

  21. The PDO flipped negative in 2008, the AMO a year or so later. The latter is not very consistent but you can expect this climatic teleconnection to persist at least a decade, perhaps two.

    As the cooling settles in(over a few years?) high plains drought will return, resembling the 1930s.

    Google McCabe +NOAA for much more. His 2004 paper broke the bad news.

    gary gulrud (790d43)

  22. I have a 55-minute commute home on a typical night. Wednesday night, it took 9 hours and 45 minutes… most of which was spent at a Turkey Hill (think 7-11 with great peach ice tea) waiting for crews to plow out my street. So I can appreciate what went down in D.C.

    either orr (6713b4)

  23. [url=http://gynecologmed.com/]Gynecologmed[/url]

    Doctor (73d481)


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