Thou Shalt Not Pass!

GAH! This morning has been the morning from purgatory! (I'm not saying from hell, because I know a few things that could have made it much worse, but it was pretty bad.)

The day started at 0300 or so, quite a bit earlier than normally. If you live inside a building of any kind (and I hope all of you, gentle readers, do!), you know that there are certain ambient noises that you have grown accustomed to. While the noises themselves are no longer noticed by you, the lack of such noises is cause for concern. I was prematurely awakened by the sounds that my house did not make. That's right, that means the power was out (which made no sense, because all the storms came through last night, not this morning!). My mother was waking everyone in the house up so that we all knew the alarms wouldn't be going off in an hour. After about 30-45 minutes, it came back, so I reset my clock and tried to take another 30 minutes of sleep. I heard my mother get in the car and go to work, then I wondered why I heard the front door open and shut twice.

While I was exercising, my mother announced that she was still home because the driver's side windshield wiper flew off her car (not just the blade, the whole wiper). Then we heard there was an accident on the Woodrow Wilson Bridge, which is, you guessed it, the way I normally take to work. It's usually in enough traffic without an accident! I pushed my dad to leave the house sooner so we had time to go around it (not an easy feat; leaving sooner or going around the accident).

Well, we didn't really leave as early as I wanted to, have been wanting to, and I was attacked by a spider web that was between my car and a tree. A really big, really sticky one. So, off we go, not to the Wilson Bridge, but towards the Southeast/Southwest Freeway to go through town. Guess what? There was an accident on the 11th Street Bridge in that direction. So, we decided to take South Capitol Street to get to the other end of the Freeway. Not done yet! The traffic lights at the Douglas Bridge were not working. It was like Gandalf had drawn a line along the Potomac River and said, "You shall not pass!" When we finally got into Virginia, it wasn't so bad (1.45 hours later). I think it's redundant to say I was late to work, at this point.

And, to top it all off, we didn't sail last night! The race was canceled because of an impending storm that was supposed to hit right as we were scheduled to start the race. The storm did show up, albeit not quite at that time, so it's probably better we weren't out in it. We got to sit in the restaurant and mingle, though we stayed much later than I wanted to. I still got to bed around 2130, which isn't too bad.

Here's to a better drive home!