Going Underground - which London Underground tube line are you?
I'm the DISTRICT line!

Well, I'm glad that's sorted out.

The nice people at JournalScape are apparently having a little trouble with their ISP, so you may experience difficulties accessing Entia Multiplicanda over the next few days. The management apologizes for any inconvenience, anxiety, or emotional distress due to being deprived of fresh posts about writing, traffic on interstate 880, and the state of my iTunes playlists.

Speaking of iTunes playlists, I forgot to mention their value as an anti-procrastination tool. Anti-procrastination tool, I hear you say? Sure. Last Thursday, I made a big ol' playlist of lots of great songs I hadn't heard in ages, sat down at the computer, slapped on the headphones, and started working. Every time I started to get up and go do something else, another great song that I hadn't heard in ages would come up, and I'd stay at the computer to hear it. (I guess this works best if you have headphones that keep you on a short leash.) I must have squeezed a good 2-3 extra hours of work out of myself that way, and I enjoyed every minute of it. It more than made up for the amount of time it took to make up the playlist.

In case anyone's curious, Cinderella's "Gypsy Road" has been displaced to #23 on my top 25 most played list, and the current #1 spot is occupied by Audioslave's "I am the Highway."

If I were a highway, I wouldn't want to be I-880. There's a Maurice Sendak book in there somewhere:

In December, I will be: a California Freeway. Wheee!
Let morons drive all over me!
Brakelights once! Pile-ups twice!
Rush hour on 880's nice!

Ahem. I seem to have some kind of weird driving karma. Friday before last, as I was driving back from San Jose, nobody was using their turn signals. Changing lanes all over the place, no turn signals. I had a really exciting close encoutner with a big maroon SUV that could have been entirely avoided with the use of the exciting new modern technology of turn signals.

So guess what I encounter on yesterday's I-880 outing? Yep. At least 3 drivers who'd left their left signal blinkers on and forgotten about them.

Plus a Lexus with windshield wipers still working away at max speed as we passed the Oakland Coliseum, when the rainstorm we passed through had ended somewhere in Fremont. That was just amusing, really. Did the driver not notice that the rain had stopped? Do the wipers on a Lexus not make that lovely screeching sound across a dry windshield that the wipers on my car make?

This seems very Californian, going on about freeway driving like this. Probably dull, too. I picked up some audiobooks at the Berkeley library yesterday, so I'll have something besides my fellow drivers' to amuse me on my next drive.