The morning commute was… less than fun.
Some mornings it’s a breeze. Other mornings, Liberty Road is a sodding nightmare. Earlier this week–was it Tuesday?–it took half an hour to go the six miles to the Beltway. For some reason traffic didn’t move once I’d reached the Rolling Road intersection, and then, suddenly, it did. No clue.
Today was like that.
Unfortunately, I also know why today was like that.
Police cruisers went screaming down Liberty Road. So did an ambulence. Traffic merged into the center-most lane. A police car, its lights flashing, had one lane of Liberty Road blocked off. An accident.
A car had struck a bicycle at the intersection with one of the side streets. The bike was on its side in the middle of the intersection, its handlebars on the asphalt, the front wheel in the air. No sign of the rider–the ambulence was sitting there. Two police officers were talking to the driver–a woman, maybe mid-thirties–as traffic crawled by.
Not the sight one wants to see on the way into work.
My mother’s brother was killed in a car-meets-bicycle accident. I never knew him–it happened four years before I was born–which is why I’ve never been able to think of him as my “uncle,” even though it’s the right and proper word.
I could have used more coffee today. (Yes, there’s no transition there. Deal.) I’m not sure why I could have used more coffee, only that I needed more coffee.
I had fun at work today. One piece I wrote quoted Laurence Binyon’s “For the Fallen,” Herman Melville, and “Heart of Oak,” the Royal Navy march. Another was an interview piece. A third quoted Sun Tzu.
I started wondering. Why are Excel macros so much more elegant than Word macros? Mind you, until a week ago I’d never written an Excel macro, and now I’ve written several. And the code is so much more elegant and poetic than the typical Word macro I’ve written. It’s the same language, for Rassilon’s sake–VBA. Yet the Word macros seem kludgey. Maybe it’s because of the way a spreadsheet is structured–the rigid grid makes it easier for the code to work with, hence the more elegant code. Word, on the other hand, is an anything-goes environment, so that makes the macro code overwrought.
Pointless random factoids amuse me. Just sayin’, is all.
And tomorrow! An autographing! Go me!