Coolest Idea Ever (If I Were An Inventor)

I have always envied people that are truly intelligent across the board. I mean, obviously everyone has some things they're smarter at than others (my sister, a brilliant microbiologist, put "toona" on a shopping list made after she'd received her PhD), but there are some that are just true renaissance peeps.

Sadly, I'm not one of them. I had a stroke of genius on my drive home last night, though, that made me wish I was.

So it snowed again (I'm sure you're shocked to hear that), and I had my typical white-knuckled run down the back roads of very, very rural New Hampshire. After I picked Addie up from school, I spent the entire drive home trying to explain to her how to drive in snow, which is a little bit tricky because my car has all wheel drive and hers doesn't (plus it's very small and light), so most of what I was telling her doesn't even apply.

Anyway, I dropped her off at home then went to get Belle, and while I was driving I couldn't help thinking about how fortunate the kids in driver's ed right now are. Addie took driver's ed in the late summer and early fall, so she had no formal instruction (beyond the book, which is of course very theoretical) in the fine art of driving in snow.

There are pros and cons to having an ADHD mind, but one thing that's essentially a wash is the ability to connect things together that have absolutely no relation to a normal person, and to do it in a matter of seconds. My brain synapses are always at hyperspeed unless I'm reading or writing (most ADHD folk have an activity that allows them to "hyper-focus" ... sadly it's video games a lot of the time, but for me it has always been reading). The overactive brain synapses, by the way, are very helpful when writing and explain a great deal about why I write in fits and spurts much of the time ... namely, I picture what happens next in my mind, often at night when I can't sleep, but don't write it down right away.

And I'm way off-topic, which is of course the hard-core downside to the ADHD brain ...

Anyway, I explain that because, in a matter of seconds, I came up with the coolest idea ever. The thought process went something like this:

1. The driving really sucks.
2. There are a lot of inexperienced drivers on the road. Even though I'm crazy overprotective and won't let Addie drive in snow, there are a lot of kids driving today that really shouldn't be.
3. I'm going to have to teach Addie to drive in the snow one of these days. It's going to be horrible.
4. Why isn't "snow-driving" a required part of driver's ed?
5. The space shuttle Challenger exploded twenty-five years ago this week.
6. My fourth grade teacher cried ... I had never seen a teacher cry before.
7. I'm surprised they haven't made a movie of the Challenger disaster yet ... after all, they did for Apollo 13.
8. Apollo 13 was a really neat movie.
9. Gary Sinise always seems to get that "unsung hero" role, which he's very good at.
10. Gary Sinise, playing the role of Ken Mattingly, is what stands out the most to me about that movie because he was stuck in that space simulator trying to figure out how to save his colleagues.
11. I watched an iCarly episode with Belle where Carly and her peeps were in a space simulator.

And ... *ka-bam*

12. How cool would it be if there was a "driving-in-snow" simulator? That would allow driving students to have the experience of driving in snow without being an any true danger. There are a certain number of required hours for nighttime driving, highway driving, and so on ... why not "snow driving", at least in areas where snow is a concern?

I wish I had some idea of how to actually go about doing this, because I think it would be very helpful :-)

So 34 Is When the Middle-Aged Thing Kicks In ...

I realized today that I'm getting old.

I joke all the time about how old I'm getting, give my students a hard time about the strands of gray in my hair, and tease the rookie teachers about being babes in the woods. In general, though, I feel pretty much the same as I always did, so I'd written off 34 as just another number ... until it came crashing down on me that I'm not a kid anymore.

Okay, here's what happened.

I have a lead foot. I don't mean to speed, it's just not something I pay the best attention to. I have (knock on wood) never been in a real car accident ... I just like to drive fast. And, to be fair, I don't drive anywhere near as fast as I used to (racking up the speeding tickets will do that).

I live in New Hampshire. I've been driving in snow, often quite a lot of snow, since I was sixteen. Truth be told, I love to drive in snow. Well, I did.

Until I woke up this morning, and the roads were sheets of ice, and it took me almost two hours to get to work. It then snowed all day, and the drive home ... well, they say a picture's worth a thousand words (and no, I probably should not have been taking a picture of how bad the driving was while I was actually driving).



So what happened to turn me from a lover of snow-driving to a cautious Cathy?

It's weird, but the only thing I can think of is that a couple of my friends were in a pretty bad snow-related car accident recently. I've driven in snow since, but I haven't been enjoying it as much, and today I was honestly afraid.

I went to one of those friends, Donna, for advice on which route to take home today--the flatter, longer one or the shorter, ridiculously steeper one. She voted for short and steep, so I headed out as soon as possible.

And I don't think I hit 20 MPH for the duration of that long, long back mountain road. Donna was right behind me, which I thought she realized, but once I got onto a main road that was at least moderately maintained, I got a text.

DONNA: Stay off Mountain Road. Very slippery.
KATIE: Thank you, but I was the car in front of you driving like a grandma ;)
DONNA: Okay, I did not mind.
KATIE: : )

And it hit me like a ton of breaks how fragile life is, how truly dangerous driving in snow is, and how fortunate I am to have reached the age of 34 considering the parking lot doughnuts and the reckless, unnecessary trips and the lack of understanding I had of what a responsibility driving is.

This was driven home, by the way, when I got onto another semi-back road (I had to go pick Addie up ... I didn't let her drive herself to school today) and this guy started tailgating me. Like, I have All Wheel Drive and I was slipping and sliding a bit, and this guy was so close I could not see the front of his car.

Ten years ago--heck, one year ago, I would have started driving faster because obviously the pace I was setting wasn't good enough. Today, I pulled over to the side of the road and let the guy pass me.

Yup, middle age hits at 34, if I'm any indication ... unless that's just adulthood in general catching up to me at last ;)

I'm Sorry, Kermit!

When I was seventeen, I hit a chipmunk on my way to work. It was the first time I'd ever killed anything in my life (I'm one of those people that catches a spider or bumblebee then releases them outside--the only exception is mosquitos), and I was distraught. I was such a mess, in fact, that I actually got sent home from work because I couldn't stop crying.

I've had other roadkill incidents since then, and while I always feel badly about it, I no longer go into hysterics. I mean, sometimes those squirrels just run right out in front of you. I always try to dodge them if possible, but sometimes there's just nothing you can do.

Something happened one night last week that reminded me of my utter devastation over the first chipmunk I hit, and it got me pondering the proverbial food chain and the equity (or inequity, I guess you'd say) of the animals, big and small, that are killed incidentally by human beings.

I live very close to the ocean, and there is a lot of marshland surrounding the roads near my house. Sometimes at night, you can hear the frogs singing, a beautiful choir that's obviously not planned but somehow sounds intentional anyway.

One night last week, I was coming home from dinner in Massachusetts with a friend. It was pretty late--bordering on midnight--and it had been raining all day and most of the night. All of a sudden, with no warning at all, the boggy road I was on was covered with frogs. Covered.

I felt a twinge of the girl I was at seventeen rise up inside as I realized that I was driving over frogs. Like, multitudes of frogs. We're talking froggie family reunion here.

I considered reversing up the road, changing direction, getting back on the highway, and going home in a way that would have allowed me to circumvent the avenue of amphibians. If I'd been seventeen, I would without question have done it. There were two things that stopped me:

1) I could see in my rear view mirror that the frogs that had escaped certain death under the deadly wheels of my car were hopping over their dead and injured brethren, bound for the relative safety of the moonlit marshes on either side of the road. They had avoided the wheel of fortune's death knell once, and it seemed cruel on a whole bunch of levels to reverse over them--I don't know much, but I do know that fate only goes your way so many times, and they'd already been scared and shaken.

2) It was very late, I was exhausted, and I wanted to be home as quickly as possible.

And so I plowed ahead, flattening countless frogs in the process because they were so prolific that attempting to dodge them was futile. For nearly a mile, though, I weaved my little sedan slowly around the larger gathering spots, avoiding sitting water because they really seemed to conglomerate in and around puddles on the road.

And I cried, not with the sharp and sudden agony of knowing that I'd killed a little chipmunk dashing across the street but with a longer, stronger awareness that the road was basically paved with frogs, that I did not want to hurt them and wished that they would hop off to froggie endeavors that would have kept them off the road, and that, ultimately, there was absolutely nothing I could do to change my undesired mass murder of dozens, maybe hundreds of frogs.

It occurred to me as I drove, trying to ignore the fact that the normally smooth road was characterized by scores of small but frequent bumps, that there were many metaphors to be drawn here ... and that none of them were happy.

The Gas Gauge Conundrum

I noticed something funny this morning on my lovely hour-long commute to work (where I'm spending my summer vacation because that line about teachers having all summer off is pure hogwash).

I filled my car up with gas last night because the little red light came on when I was going to the store to grab a dark chocolate Milky Way (for Addie, not for me ... I made do with Oreos out of the cupboard).

When I was maybe five minutes away from work, I looked at my gas gauge and noticed that it was still on F. It got me thinking about how there are a ton of little measurement lines on the gas gauge, yet for me, there are only four real gas status reports:

1. Full tank.
2. Half tank.
3. Almost on E.
4. Shit, the warning light's on.

I honestly don't think I notice when the little indicator is anywhere else other than those four places.

I'm kind of weird, aren't I ;-)?

License to Throttle the DMV

So I got a letter from the state DMV yesterday informing me that I have six points on my license and that a "driver improvement" class is recommended. Oh, and should I get any further points on my license, I will lose it for a year.

Now, I'm the person that tells students that breaking the dress code just because so-and-so got away with wearing a skirt more than four inches above the knee does not make it right. I believe in rules and, when necessary, I believe in consequences. That's why I'm not going to belabor the point that three of the points are from speeding tickets dating back to 2003, when I was commuting over three hours a day (sometimes the law of averages are just not on your side) and the other three came all at once for my allegedly passing a school bus (which in retrospect I should have fought in court since I DID NOT PASS A SCHOOL BUS, but it happened right around the time that everything was blowing up with the ex-husband, and it seemed easier to just pay the $100 fine).

Nope, my point is a bit simpler. The aforementioned ex-husband, who drove drunk and recklessly for months and received two DWIs within a couple of weeks, is slated to get his license back in August (that's a year after losing it, ladies and gentlemen) because--drum roll--he took a driver improvement program. The reason for this is actually what I'm further annoyed by. Basically, he received the second DWI before his court date for the first one, so technically it's only considered one offense.

I take full responsibility for my speeding tickets. I sped. I did. Penalize me, by all means. And penalize me if you must for not being in a position to fight the stupid school bus thing (I'm a teacher--I would not and did not pass the freaking school bus). But how DARE you imply that going 78 in a 65 MPH zone is remotely comparable to aggravated drunk driving?

So let me get this straight--three minor offenses (we're talking 78 MPH on a 65 MPH highway) nearly seven years ago, and I'm set to lose my license for the same amount of time as a serial drunk driver? Am I the only one confused by this?

Vanity Plates

When I was driving home today, I saw a license plate in front of me that read:"KEEPBZS". I spent a ridiculously long time trying to figure out what it meant.

"Keep busy"? Perhaps, but why the 's' at the end?

"Keep bees"? A bit more promising, although I might have just been excited about being behind a beekeeper.

I kept running things through my head. Key peeps? Keepsies? It was randomly a lot of fun, which I've found vanity plates to be...even if you never know the intended meaning.

I used to have vanity plates. They read: "UONCRK", and I had them until I received notice from the DMV that someone found my plates offensive, so they were being revoked. Although she swears up and down she didn't, I remain convinced that my mother wrote that letter ;)