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Yesterday afternoon, five inches of snow fell on Madison in just a couple of
hours. Sarah and I just happened to be out and about running an errand
when the snow started coming down in earnest.

The Beltline highway, on
which we were traveling, is normally a high-speed, limited access road
similar to an Interstate highway. Yesterday, however, with blowing and
drifting snow and limited vision, most people were traveling about 30-45
mph.

Select idiots eager to leap out of the gene pool (most driving
pickup trucks and SUVs), were traveling 50-65 mph in the so-called fast
lane. This morning, the local NPR station leads off with this
headline, “Five inches of snow caused two huge pile-up accidents
on the Interstate 90 on Madison’s East Side.”

My initial
reaction, of course, was that five inches of snow had nothing to do with
it. The real cause of the accidents was a failure of people to
recognize that travel conditions dictated slower speeds and increased
attention to the road. However, not a word was said in the report
about how it requires too many people traveling entirely too fast in poor
conditions to cause a 42 car collision and a twelve car collision.

Rather than blame drivers for acting like idiots and taking lives into their
hands (their own lives and others), society chooses to blame the snow.

How dare the snow fall in Wisconsin in January!

Even after leaving the
Beltline, Sarah and I saw accident after accident on the surface
streets. Most of the accidents were one car rear-ending another car
after driving too fast or following too closely.

Have people forgotten
that even though they have all-wheel drive to get going, oftentimes the
biggest problem in the winter is getting stopped?!? Of course, society
doesn’t fault people for driving like idiots. We’d rather fault the
snow. I thought that this excerpt from the Wisconsin State
Journal was telling:

“The first officer at the scene of the crash was State Patrol Sgt. Dennis
Kruger. He said several cars that passed him while he was driving to the
scene of the accident at 35 mph with his emergency lights on were eventually
involved in the pileup.

“‘I had my window rolled down and could hear the cars crashing into
each other as I rolled up to the scene,’ Kruger said.’ ‘You just
can’t stop on glare ice.’”

Sarah and I got many home improvement projects done or started this
weekend.

On Saturday, we replaced a hollow-core door between the
kitchen and the garage with a pre-hung steel door. On Sunday, we
replaced the (leaking) plumbing under our laundry sink with a set of PVC
replacement components. The previous owners reacted to a corroded pipe
(i.e., the pipe walls in the trap had corroded through) by wrapping the pipe
in electrical tape. I’ll leave it to the reader to imagine how well
that worked.

We also replaced some cabinet knobs, put in some
insulation in the basement, patched a broken window in the rear door of our
garage, and did some other miscellaneous chores. After all that was
done, of course, we got to shovel five inches of snow off the walk.

We’re looking forward to the weekdays now when we can take some time off.

Fifteen people died on Wisconsin Highways in the first two days of
2004. Fifteen!

The home improvement industry would be better served by turning out more
specific instructions.

The directions we used to install the door this
weekend were something like seven steps. Of course, the directions
started at a point where you had a door-shaped hole in the house. No
guidance in taking out the old door or making a fresh, new hole in your
house was given. Even the steps that were listed were occasionally
vague. Some pointers about how to use shims to hold the door in place
would have been nice. Some tips on how to center the door in the
opening, while maintaining a square frame, with a door that swung freely in
the frame would have been greatly appreciated. Instead, we got
glowingly vague instructions and happy little line-drawing people.

This sort of nearly worthless instruction is not limited to pre-hung
doors. Nearly every sort of home improvement project is not burdened
with a surfeit of instructions, but rather awash in a sea of silence for
specific steps in the process. If directions to build a new house were
written like most home improvement project directions, they would read
something like this:

1. Remove parts for new house from package.
2. Build new house.
3. Move in and enjoy your new home!

Yesterday, NPR reported that 40 people in Los Angelees have died from
“celebratory gunfire” since 1985.

Where, exactly, do people
think bullets go when they are shot into the air? Into space? If
it was that easy to achieve escape velocity, garbagemen would be out of
business as we’d all just load our household trash into giants bullets for
giant neighborhood guns to shoot into space. In reality, bullets
follow the generally true maxim that “what goes up must come crashing
back down to Earth in a truly spectacular fashion.” Note to
self: if you find yourself in LA for New Year’s Eve, remember to bring
a Kevlar helmet.

More people died on Wisconsin roads last year (837) than in any year since
1981. What do state officials blame for this shocking statistic?

Let’s start by examining the following facts:

• Subdivisions and shopping centers are now built almost exclusively with
  cars in mind.
• Funding for public transportation is either stalled or shrinking in
  almost every municipality.
• Funding for highway construction and reconstruction is growing at a
  healthy yearly rate.
• As a result of these factors, the number of miles driven by citizens has
  increased every year. (58.6 billion miles for all Wisconsin drivers,
  combined; 586 million more miles than last year)
• There is a direct correlation between the number of miles driven
  by any given individual and the chances of ending up in some sort of car
  crash. If you don’t believe me, ask the automobile insurance industry.
• More of the vehicles on the road are bigger and heavier (read: SUVs)
  than historically has been the case.
• The average speed driven on Wisconsin roads has also crept upwards.
• Heavier objects traveling at higher rates of speed have more energy that
  must be dissipated in any sort of crash, thereby causing more injury to
  drivers, bicyclists, and pedestrians.

Given all that, what would state transportation officials blame for the
grim highway death statistics? Motorcyles, of course. 22
motorcyclists did the state DOT a disfavor and got themselves killed.

We celebrated the New Year’s arrival last night by going to bed before
midnight. Some friends came over for dinner. We made Indian food
(soup, a dal, and naan), drank wine and beer, ate florentines (cookies like
we had at the wedding), and talked. We were all spent (for a variety
of reasons) and falling asleep in the living room by 11:30. Our
friends packed themselves into their car and went home. We fell into
bed and greeted the New Year this morning.