Tuesday, July 25, 2017

Driving home = bad

Sitting here, trying to calm down a little before trying to practice more piano.

Driving in my town is becoming worse and worse.

The first thing: I take First to Wilson to get to my building. Just north of where I turn on Wilson, the ODOT has torn up a bridge and has Wilson posted as a detour. Wilson is a twisty-turny road with poor visibility. It also has an apartment complex with insufficient parking on part of it* so people park in the street. So you have to be SO careful at the best of times.

(*Because of "who" owns the apartment complex, no one feels they can say "boo" about the fact that people are parking on a street where THERE SHOULD BE NO ON-STREET PARKING. Really, the owner should build a few more parking lots and require people to park in them, but that's never gonna happen).

Anyway. People either don't fully grok, or don't care, that Wilson is (a) posted at 30, (b) has poor visibility, and (c) is kind of narrow. More than once I've had to pull tight over against, or even up onto, the curb, because someone was "taking their half out of the middle." I've also had to slam on the brakes more than once - had to do that today as someone came roaring up the middle of the street and they didn't pull into their lane until they saw me stopped some 100 feet back from where I first saw them. I think this driver was on a cell phone. I regularly see bad drivers with either a phone mashed to their ear, or doing that "hold it flat and talk at it while driving with one hand" thing or, worst of all, TEXTING - I was very nearly in a head on collision with someone who pulled out of the apartment complex parking lot WHILE TEXTING and slewed over into my lane. Like she could not have taken 15 seconds before pulling out of her parking place to send that text?

The worse thing? Driving home, someone pulled straight out of a parking lot on First - I KNOW they saw me - and I had to hit the brakes so they didn't t-bone me. I'm still shaking from that one.

I find when I've had a fright like that I get shaky and almost weepy for a bit. (I don't get angry after being scared, often, I get weepy).

It's just: our town is SO small and has so few amenities (compared to a town of similar size in other parts of the country - the "western mindset" is that driving an hour for stuff is no problem) and it just feels extremely wrong that I have to deal with such terrible drivers.

I also don't feel great because it's super humid and my asthma is acting up a little and for me it seems to manifest as a feeling of "I'm super anxious and my heart is beating too fast and my chest is tight" and it's really just my asthma from the humidity....so yeah, not good.

I'm also trying to reduce a little so I can't even use the typical food-comforts like making pancakes for dinner.....

Edited to add: I just realized, I drove SEVEN FREAKING HOURS on Saturday (not even counting the time tooling around Longview with Laura) and I didn't see as bad of driving as I saw here in town today. Argh.

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