Road rage

Yesterday was not so good.

Knowing that when you get off work you'll have to go to your old crummy apartment and clean the bathroom and the kitchen and the grime in the window tracks doesn't make a hard day any easier. I was in one of my darker misanthropic moods and everyone from my favorite coworker to the toothless fishermen on the phone (hints! hints about where I work!) was making me INSANE. My office is a friendly bubbly place and most of the time I appreciate that as I have none of the friendly bubbliness inside my own crabby soul and have to learn sunny dispositions from others, but yesterday I wanted to Do My Work, Not Be Bothered and then I wanted to Go Home. Phillip says I should use my down time at work to "explore other projects" and other professional-sounding and career-oriented things like that. But when I have down time, that means I finished what I had to do that day and when I'm finished I just want to GO HOME. I HATE having to make my work stretch till 5 o'clock. No wonder I am a veritable font of pop culture trivia with all my time to surf the internet.

(Disclaimer: I am not always bored and watching the clock. Some days I am very very busy. Some days I do not have time to breathe let alone read the Gilmore Girls recap. And I definitely reserve the right to complain about the slow days AND the days when I can't read my recaps. Capisce?)

So anyway. Work=hate. When faced with the following choices for my lunch break: going to the alterations shop to drop off the Ginormous Bridesmaid Dress (which would involve standing around in front of strangers in my underwear, FUN) or going to the licensing agency to transfer ownership of the car we bought on behalf of my dad a MONTH ago (which would involve lying about how much he paid for it AND when he bought it, FUN), I decided to go the high road and go to the fancy grocery store and browse through the flowering baskets and vegetable starts. So irresponsible!

But THEN, about 4:45, right before we were about to pack up and leave, the eternally-tuned-to-AM-talk-kill-me-now-please radio screeched, "There's been a rollover accident on the Ballard Bridge."

Employees who live on the other side of the Ballard Bridge: "DAMMIT!"

Employees who live 2 minutes away in Queen Anne: "Hee!"

In order to help those of you who are not familiar with Seattle geography, I have prepared for you a primitive yet still helpful visual aid:

Seattle commuters are basically screwed by a little body of water called Lake Union and what you see here is the channel of water between Lake Union and the Puget Sound. This is the pretty water I can see from my building and today, with the 80 degree sunshine, is particularly beautiful. As you can see from the map, though, I HAVE TO CROSS A FRICKIN BRIDGE TO GET HOME. With a rollover accident on the Ballard Bridge (where they had ONE lane open for north AND south traffic), there was huge spillover for the Fremont Bridge and the Aurora Bridge (which I couldn't fit on my map and also, I always get lost trying to get on that stupid bridge so no point in including it).

It seemed the accident had just happened and we could still see traffic moving on the bridge, so we left the office Right That Second- but in the time it took me to jump into my beloved automobile and head for the exit, all traffic in the Seattle metro area came to a standstill. So what do I do? I hang a quick right turn into the greater depths of Magnolia thinking I'm going to outsmart everyone using my store of Back Roads knowledge.

Unfortunately, I HAVE no store of back roads knowledge- not in this part of town, anyway. It took me a half hour to even cross into Queen Anne where I proceeded to drive down any road that was open, meaning that I kept driving in the opposite direction of my house. Eventually I hunkered down and joined the long snail crawl of cars heading for the Aurora Bridge, but, again, I thought I could outsmart the rest of Seattle commuters and instead plunged down the north side of Queen Anne to hook up with the Fremont Bridge.

It was 5:51 when I finally made it to the other side of the water. I am usually home at 5:25. At the LATEST. And then it took another 20 minutes to get to my house WHEREUPON...

I had to change into grungy clothes, get BACK in the car, and head to the apartment to CLEAN THE TOILET.

At the time I was thinking that we were going to have our apartment walk-through Friday night, but that was until Phillip remembered that he had two days worth of band practice plus a dinner with long lost relatives to attend. So my rushing over there last night to get stuff done? Not entirely necessary.

Today looks like somewhat of a replay of yesterday, minus (hopefully) a rollover accident. And if THAT happens again, it doesn't matter because I'm going to dinner in Chinatown to meet the long lost relatives and churn out smiley phrases like "Yes, I love Chinese food!" and "It's okay, I can eat with chopsticks!"