this is not a journal title

In a year and a half of my super long commute, I am now up to my third harrowing experience driving - first was the blizzard 13 Dec 2007, second was my flat tire 18 Nov 2008 (which I apparently never blogged), and this third one was a truck losing a wheel right after I drove past. I did see the aftermath of a dump truck that lost a wheel over the median around a year ago, but that didn't directly affect me.

Today I was driving on my nice long drive home and on a long straight stretch I noticed a red van driving in the breakdown lane with its hazards on. He was driving a little fast for the shoulder, and he wasn't entirely in it, and I couldn't tell what was going on, so I preemptively moved into the left lane. The highway wasn't that crowded, it was around 4:30 in the afternoon which is before main rush hour, so as I passed there was no one in the right lane between myself and the van, and the other cars in the right lane were a ways ahead of us and the semi truck in the right lane was aways behind myself and the van. As I passed I watched the van and found myself thinking that the two wheels on the left seemed like they were tipped so the bottoms were pointing outwards more than they should. I was just wondering if that was the issue when I looked back at the van in my rear view mirror and watched the front left wheel come off and the shaft throw off sparks as it hit the pavement.

I quickly threw my eyes back at the road, taking note of the mile marker as I passed it, fumbled for my cell with my right hand, and 911 transferred me to the state police just as I pulled off at the rest stop. I was pulling off because I realized I was shaking. These (mental) near-misses always get to me - "mental" because the van was never physically close to me, I never had to adjust my driving, but in my head was the realization that if things had been timed differently I could've been involved. Surprisingly the van did not seem to swerve when its axle hit the pavement, and for the tiny bit I watched I didn't see any other cars hit it, so perhaps everyone was okay in the end. Just realized now I was shaken up enough by it that I didn't remember to put my cell out of emergency tracking mode; I usually do that a bit after completing the 911 call.

( If you've never called 911 for a fellow motorist, here's what to expect )

I'd managed to push today's incident out of my head for a while (I made pizza!), but watching a car chase in Numb3rs with a large red SUV brought it back, and after telling T$ I was still shaking so I typed it up here, and now I'm still shaking, so I think I will go do something relaxing instead of shaking or trying to work. Or maybe work will drive it out.

I just finished the audiobook of The Golden Compass, by Philip Pullman. I wanted to read it for a while after sclerotic_rings and others told me to, but never got around to it. Then I saw they're making a movie of it with Nicle Kidman as Ms. Coulter. So when I saw an audiobook of it at a B&N, I grabbed it up. It's a short one, only 9 CDs total, unabridged, and it's narrated by the author with a cast doing the characters, which is unusual but interesting. It's definitely a young adult work, but there are elements of particle physics and ideas from quantum mechanics that I was shocked and delighted to find in such a book. It's worth reading.

And then it ended. At only 9 CDs and a 1:15 commute, that's around a week to finish the book.

So T$ reminded me of Project Gutenberg - a project to make all public domain literature freely available on the web. There are two sections or lists that I will find useful in the future and therefore wish to draw your attention to: the list of all Sci-Fi, and the lists of all audio works (broken down into sub-categories of human read and computer read).

I've also been wanting to read Beowulf, so that's currently downloading from Gutenberg while The Subtle Knife (sequel to the Golden Compass) is also dowloading via iTunes. Hooray for more bandwidth hogging! ^_^ Next task: burn as mp3's to CDs to play in my car.