Category: Life

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This morning I found myself asking the question: How do you tell someone their gas cap is open at 65 MPH?

I was on one of those giant, arcing ramps connecting one freeway to another, and noticed that the car in front of me (a PT Cruiser, I think) had something flopping around on its side. It quickly became clear that it was the gas cap, still tethered to the car, with the open flap above it. As we both merged onto the next freeway, I contemplated: how could I tell the driver?

On city streets, I’d try to pull up next to the car at a red light, roll the window down, wave, maybe honk the horn, and then say, “Your gas cap is open.”

But on a highway with no stopping points, at a speed where safe driving distance would keep us out of earshot?

I thought about honking the horn. But what good would that do? A horn only says one thing: “Hey!” Sure, you can vary it a little to give it a sense of urgency — “Hey! Hey!Hey!” “Heeeeeeeey!!!!!!” But it doesn’t allow much for specifics. I suppose you could try Morse code, but I wouldn’t count on most people being able to understand it — I’m an Eagle Scout and I only remember 4 letters — and it would take too long to spell out a message anyway.

Should I try to get in the next lane, match speeds, wave, and try to point to the back of the car? No, that didn’t seem safe.

Flash my headlights? No, that had the same problem as the horn. Too vague.

Outside of the basics (turn signals & brake lights) and a few standard signals (flashing the brights to tell someone you’re passing) — there really isn’t a good way to tell another driver something specific, like “Your lights are off,” “You’ve got a coffee mug on your roof,” or “Stop trying to crawl into my trunk.” Which I suppose is just as well, judging by a random sampling of bumper stickers and the way people treat other drivers. The enhanced road rage might cause more hazards than the enhanced communication would solve.

As for this morning’s PT Cruiser, I eventually I saw it move over to the shoulder. I guess there must have been a warning light on the dashboard.

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I’d always assumed these boxes were just the usual electrical, cable, phone or other utility access points. But I walked past this one a few weeks ago and saw it open. It turned out to be a station for gathering weather data.

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Last Wednesday, on my drive home from work, I spotted a sundog on the way home from work. I finally snapped it when I pulled into the parking lot at Trader Joe’s.

The picture on the left was the best of the set, with the best contrast. The red is clearly visible on the end toward the sun, and the reflection is clearly brighter than the surrounding clouds. The one on the right is actually two minutes earlier, and isn’t as good — except that it looks like there are two sundogs (something I hadn’t noticed when I took the picture). Presumably there was a gap in the cloud of ice crystals, and one half or the other drifted out of alignment.

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06-16-07_1338.jpg, originally uploaded by Kelson.

This is a picture I took last summer of the balcony on our old apartment. I used it to test using Flickr’s email upload and blog-posting features to upload a picture straight from my phone.

Unfortunately, it needed cleanup. The title (and post slug) end up being the filename, which I suppose I can fix before sending, and the content seems to get posted twice. I suspect the phone is sending both formatted and plain-text versions of the message, and Flickr is reading them both.

Anyway, it’s not a bad picture, so I figured I’d leave it up instead of deleting the test post.

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On Monday, Katie found a bee flying around the kitchen, and a disturbing buzzing sound coming from the stove vent. Outside, bees were swarming around the outlet. We clearly had bees in the ceiling. Worse, they were getting into the kitchen. By Monday evening, we’d found at least 8 bees in the kitchen, two of them at once.

Maintenance came out that afternoon, realized there were too many bees to handle, and called in the professionals to come out on Tuesday. By Tuesday evening, there were only a handful of bees outside, and we found a half dozen dead on the floor near the window. And, disturbingly, one dying bee stuck in a pool of unidentified goo in a skillet that had been left to dry on the stove.

And that was the end of it, until Katie opened up the cabinet above the stove today, and was greeted by the sight of dozens of dead bees:

They weren’t just in the vent, or the ceiling: if we’d opened that cabinet on Monday, we’d have had a full-on swarm in the kitchen.

Current Music: Tori Amos: Sleeps With Butterflies (which, appropriately, is on “The Beekeeper”)

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