2000-01-28 - 00:25:05

REGULATIONS & VARIATIONS

big hassle here, you can't get ticketed for using a cell phone (handheld) while driving an automobile. but you can get ticketed for not wearing your seat belt. if an officer sees that you are not wearing one, you get a ticket and pay a fine.

right turns on red lights ? o.k. some of the time. some arteries have double left turn lanes, some don't and the traffic wizards seem to be in a continual quandry of which to put where, so there are constant changes.

some arteries have left turn lights, some don't. some of the lights are lit before the other cars going that direction get the green light when the turn light turns off. other arteries the turn arrow does not light until a timed amount of through traffic has passed, this too changes without notice. the traffic regulation does not have a discernable pattern. drive across town and encounter sensless deviations everywhere.

even when you think you have it all stowed in your skull and things are peachy you find out they aren't any more. some little gremlins and elves and gahnommies have changed everything around over night it seems.

one way streets are switched to and fro in a radical manner.

the traffic light pattern downtown is different yet. a traffic engineer thought that having a period where only pedestrians can walk, any how they wish, cater cornered or whatever. he thought it would speed things up. i'm not very sure what it was supposed to speed up, but anyhow they hung his name on it and called it the "Barnes Dance."

at least that was the way it was when i last had to do business down there.

an anomaly to me is that i was born here, raised here, married here and we had kids here, but when the wife and i start out to go somewhere we find that we can't get there from here. places we are familiar with are not there anymore, some have been bulldozed and cracker box buildings have been erected there. poking up through the new stuff are the grand old buildings built in the late 1800's still good for another 100 or more years. those oldies have seen many, many new buildings erected and in a few years razed to make room for progress.

so, often the wife and finally get to a location only to find it's not there any more, and we turn to each other and one of us will say, "well, it was here last week."

i may be getting old, but not senile and i think this continuous change is getting in the way of common sense, concrete progress.

yunno, p

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d maybe ?

g'night

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