Category: Daily Life

Ramblings, often stream of conscious, journaling the events of my life.

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Your misfortune brings our fortune

I just got solicited by an honest to goodness ambulance chaser! They had their phone number as "private" and even introduced themselves in such a deceptive away as to imply that they might be with one of the insurance companies. I should have responded to her inquiry about my well being with "I’m dead! I saw the light and I just couldn’t go yet. Now I’m stuck! Help me! My family can’t hear me when I talk to them and they look right through me. I can’t touch them. Help me cross over! I don’t belong here!"

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I-40 is closed! Stay at home!

Gas is now more expensive than milk and I am tempted to see if my van runs better on whole or 2%.

That’s right! Interstate 40 is closed at downtown Knoxville for 14 months! This could be reason enough for me to stay at home. I highly encourage telecommuting and shopping from home. I wonder if we could use our webcam for dog school and karate classes?



Traffic Cameras provided by TDOT SmartWay (per linking policy)
View the many other cameras.

I-40 runs the width of the United States starting in my birth town of Wilmington, North Carolina and running all the way to Barstow, California with the most miles of I-40 running through Tennessee. When I lived in Germantown, Tennessee (Memphis) I-40 had a peculiarity, it dead ended at the Memphis Zoo (specifically Overton Park). A roughened road would audibly warn you that the Interstate was coming to a stop and suddenly you were at a traffic light. You’d travel a few blocks on local roads then get back on the interstate again. I even remember discussion of running a tunnel under the zoo. Apparently the northern loop of I-240 (the Memphis bypass) has now been redesignated as I-40.

In Memphis, I-40 was originally intended to go through the city’s Overton Park toward downtown. Several miles of interstate were actually built within the I-240 loop; this portion of highway still exists and is in regular use as Sam Cooper Boulevard, reaching the eastern end of Chickasaw Country Club. Environmentalist opposition, combined with a victory in the United States Supreme Court by opponents of the Overton Park route … forced abandonment of the original plans, and the road never reached the park. For over 20 years, I-40 signage existed on the dead-end route toward Overton Park. Eventually, the northern portion of the I-240 loop was redesignated as I-40. [Source, Wikipedia]

I remember I-40 ending at Raleigh, North Carolina. It took 4 hours to drive a two lane road the rest of the way to Wilmington. In the 1980s, I-40 was extended all the way to Wilmington, that travel time is cut in half. I remember using those 2 extra hours as an excuse to not visit my grandparents.

Thanks to the interstate highway system, it is now possible to travel from coast to coast without seeing anything. [Source, Wikipedia, Charles Kuralt]

Les Jones has wonderful pictures of I-40’s construction through Knoxville in the 60s! The photos are out west toward West Hills and Lovell but they are fascinating to see this monstrosity of concrete plowing through people’s farms. I found the pictures intriguing in considering what structures were at the junctions then and now. Redmondkr, in a Knoxviews comment, provided a wonderful areal photograph he took in the 70s which is in sharp comparison to how malfunction junction appears in today’s GoogleMaps.

This Saturday our family will experience the SmartFix as we have to travel out Strawberry Plains way for dog school. I am sure we will Twitter, Flickr, and Utterz our experience the whole way! Knoxviews calls this SmartFIX40: The Apocalypse. So far the TDOT traffic cameras don’t show traffic as that bad.

If you are interested in saving the latest wilderness of the Southeast, dislike seeing needless billions of dollars spent, and want to make a difference, please visit stopi-3.org!

Update: Read what others are saying about Smartfix40!

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Of Being Dad

My life is written like a sitcom. Today is critically important that I be working on a client’s project so I am trying to get the children out of the house as quickly as possible and they are moving slower than ever! Amy likes the Dannables yogurts in her lunch. Yesterday we had about 6 of these in the fridge. This morning none! All the jellos and snacks I normally put in her lunch are raided and of course I’d already cooked her hot dog so telling her to buy lunch today really wasn’t an option. I suppose the dogs would have enjoyed the hot dog. I decide to send money so she can buy milk and I decide on raisins. Raisins, we all know, stick together in the box. So before opening the box I shake it vigorously. Apparently the previous raisin eater did not secure the cap so raisins went flying all over the kitchen. I suppose Murphy is trying to tell me to lighten up and not be so stressed over today.

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How do you get work done with all this blogging?

People occasionally question the amount time I waste on blogging and how it affects my productivity. First off, I advocate blogging as a means of professional improvement. I do not view any blogging as a waste. Blogging encourages research, citing of references, learning, exercising vocabulary and grammar skills, and recording of history via journaling. Blogging also polishes my technical side as I use CSS, obscure HTML, play with template designs and php code that I may not have the luxury of experimenting with on a client’s site, and use of tools which catch my xhtml errors causing me to be a better all around coder. Blogging and social networks build connections between other professionals and myself. Since I work alone in a basement, these connections are as valuable to me as the group of people someone else may work with in an office environment.

When do you find the time to blog? I blog on my breaks. Some people take smoke breaks. I take writing breaks. When I am getting the children ready for school in the morning, I cannot settle into coding but I can type out a few sentences of a post. Sometimes I do not finish the post and save it as a draft for later. I have 274 drafts of incomplete posts. This post has been sitting around since November 2, 2007 almost complete. At any time, I can change most of those into a published post within minutes. When my muse hits, say on the weekend, I may write a week’s worth of posts and schedule a couple of day for the next seven days. I had two posts publish today while I worked. They even surprised me! I have one scheduled for tomorrow that was written over the weekend.

A blog makes the reader feel they know the writer intimately; however, those words may be fiction or non-fiction, and the picture may be incomplete. The blogger may not be sharing the pain and trauma in their lives. The blogger may talk about the coolio new gadget in the house while concealing the fact that they had to hock a wedding ring and get food from Fish. In the same way, posts may publish on this blog that give the impression more time was spent on creative writing on a particular day than really happened.

Please enjoy reading Reality Me! If I do work for you, know that my duties come first, writing second.

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From the mouths of babes

Conversations that before you were a parent you never imagined really happen and in hindsight can’t believe you had:

Dad, agitated: "Noah did you go to the bathroom downstairs when you got home from school?"
Noah, exasperated: "No."
Dad, perturbed: "Tommy did you poop downstairs?"
Tommy, annoyed: "NOoooo Daaad."
Dad, disbelieving: "Sarah, did you go to the bathroom downstairs?"
Sarah, sharply: "Nope!"
Dad, grasping at straws: "Amy did you use the potty downstairs?"
Amy, lying: "Nuh uh."
Dad, befuddled: "No one used the bathroom downstairs but there’s a giant poop in it?!"