Hazards

One of the crosstitch floss tube contributors recently posted about having a near miss when she followed a truck on the interstate that was carrying loose boards.  She thought that the load was not very well tied down, and the part sticking over the tailgate slid and bumped and such every time it met a rough stretch.  Soon enough the entire load slipped  off the truck and onto the freeway where everyone ducked and swerved to get out of the path.  How hard would have been to flip a loop or two of rope around the load?  It reminded me of one time in San Francisco when I was on the freeway, 75 MPH and 4 lanes in each direction bumper to bumper, following a garbage truck.  Attached to each rear corner was a hook, and on the hook was the BIG trash cans where they would collect bags, etc., to throw in the back of the truck.  As I followed I could see the can on the left was bouncing around.  I had to stay in that lane so I could use the upcoming off ramp.  About the time it took me to write this, the left side Big can bounced off the truck and began to rolling toward me.  There was no place to go; the can rolled toward me at 60 MPH  and just before it would have smashed me and my little Miata it hit a bump in the road.  The can sailed up above me and then down behind me where it became the problem of the guy behind me.  I never saw what the consequences were for the car behind me, my exit came up (at last) and I scooted off.  That sure was the cause of a few gray hairs right there.

At dinner last night we started talking of road mishaps we've seen or heard of.  I can vouch for the one where a very large truck exited the interstate, and as the driver was making a wide curve on the exit ramp, his truck sslloowwly tipped over spilling his load of -- garbage!  What was even worse, the garbage was on its way to a land fill here in WV from  New York City.  Heads were flying over that, no one wanted to confess to being behind the deal.  Worse yet, with the truck laying on its side, they passed a cable around the trailer and attempted to pull it back upright.  Instead, the cable made a nice clean cut through the truck, spilling more garbage and now they had two loads to clear up.  The whole fiasco was easily seen from the highway, and it took days and days to get all the garbage picked up.  And all the rhetoric about WV (Wild and Wonderful) becoming a dumping ground for big city garbage, that was the last time for that arrangement.

The second spill was of a tractor trailer load of dice that scattered the payload everywhere -- they acted like ball bearings.  And the one when the load was chickens.  They weren't hurt, but they never did find them all.  The highway patrol shut down the interstate and used big sheets of plastic to try to corral the bird brains off the highway where they could be grabbed, with limited success.  And finally there was the truck pulling a stock trailer of cattle.  They hit a big bump and the connection stayed fine, but the door at the back popped open.  The driver didn't notice until he spotted cattle in his sideview mirrors, trying to chase him down.  No fools they, get back in the box...

C and I have been making progress clearing out my closet.  So far we have done all the jeans and slacks, donating about 50% of the closet.  Some with tags still on.  I dumped lots of jeans in odd colors, and anything too tired looking went also.  We were pretty tired ourselves and will have to pick another day to work on the shirts and blouses, of which there are (gulp) hundreds.  The tag thing is pretty  simple; I would buy things out of season to save money, and when the season rolled around, I will have forgotten they were there.  The floor plans of modular homes all have WICs (walk in closets) but they aren't very large, no matter how big the entire home is.  Hence the purging.

I was really really sleepy yesterday morning, literally falling asleep in my corn flakes.  I asked C if he had given me Ambien by mistake, but when he checked, it was Friday night pills I got instead of Friday morning's.  The real culprit was Xanax.  I slept another 4 hours after breakfast, but was OK by dinner time when we went to Atrias.  We had a slice of carrot cake for dessert and split it three ways, it was so huge.  And so good.