White Lightning Axiom: Redux

Everything was going well for a change. More or less till this morning. Last night, the kids went to sleep without much fuss and got up in a good mood. The fire still had some wood and embers in it this morning so I stoked it a bit to keep the heat going. Since PECO is going to raise rates 29% for natural gas, it's in my best interest to keep every little BTU I can find. It was raining since 1500 so the commute was a bit of a bugger. Not as bad as it could have been though. I even managed to drop by the local Parochial school and drop off the Encyclopedia Britannica set that I brought home from the FOB. Things got done in spite of the miserable weather. Later on in the evening it started to rain like a cow pissing on a flat rock. It was good to be inside, warm and dry.

That is the tail end of the 'easy living'. The commute this morning was straight out of Voltaire's idea of hell. I think there should be an extra ring in hell outside the ante-hell where people are stuck in traffic forever inching forward to detour signs. It was horrible. Some kind of magnetic disturbance caused all sorts of accidents this morning and the worst of it had to do with the Turnpike. First off, a semi truck had overturned at the Norristown/Mid-County interchange where all the construction and Jersey barriers are in the East-Bound lanes. This caused the turnpike to be closed ... CLOSED ... from Mid-County all the way out to KOP. That should have sucked for East-bound traffic but it had repercussions for the West-bound (my direction) as well. A looky-lou gawker rear-ended someone else going west and an ambulance had to be called: strike one. Then, an accident on the NE extension just north of the Mid-county interchange caused a back-up onto the west-bound lanes: strike two. Finally, because the east-bound turnpike was closed, all vehicles were routed off at KOP and down 76 so they could go back up 476 (Blue Route/NE Extension) to get back on the turnpike. This effectively paralyzed the tolls at KOP since there are only 3 EZPass lanes that are really useful. There are two others in the furthest left lanes but since I need to make a right offramp about 10 inches from the tolls, they are not an option. Especially when there are semi-trucks doing a conga line as far as the eye can see. Needless to say, the traffic soon became a visceral mire of anger, treachery and automatic gunfire. Well, at least in my head. The moronic perpetual state of construction on the turnpike is the single-most source of my angst ... ever see 'Falling Down'? Yeah, it could happen.

# posted by mdmhvonpa @ 8:34 AM