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Northern Virginia traffic light cycles are the longest in western civilization. Some I’ve clocked at upwards of two minutes, which gives me time to do a lot of looking around. (I expect most folks start texting; I just let my eyes wander and my brain wonder.)

Then I often reach for the camera when something piques my curiosity. Viz:

Generally speaking, the purpose of putting business details on your business vehicle is to let prospective customers know you’re in business, right? And maybe to give you a ringy-dingy? So I wondered about this one. Perhaps they’ve changed phone numbers? Or they're in stealth mode? Or they really just don’t want you calling them?

Then there was this  one:

Dunno if you can see it, but the skin looks completely crackled. As though it had shattered; just not broken apart.

I can’t decide if that’s on purpose—because glass company—or if it’s just old.

Mathematical uncertainty

‘Kay, this one’s a month old, but still.

As you know, I very often walk along the W&OD Trail, dodging cyclists and hardcore runners. Occasionally there will be signs announcing one event or another. (Although there wasn’t any advance warning about a Diabetes Run that happened two Saturdays ago; first I heard of it was them setting up for it as I did my morning stagger. And a run marshal, who was unpacking his kit and lamenting—loudly—that he was missing a page of instructions. Oops.)

Anyhow, last month I was out and saw this:

I’m still puzzling over the commutative tee-shirt.

Auto-atonement

Yom Kippur began at sundown last night and continues until dusk tonight. It’s the culmination of the Days of Awe in the Jewish calendar, and the time for a sort of moral Spring cleaning—the Day of Atonement, when you’re meant to rummage through your behavior over the previous year, acknowledge your shortcomings with respect to your fellow humans, apologize (to those they’ve trespassed against and to God) and resolve to do better.

Then—having cleared the slate, so to speak—you’re good to go for another year.

Well, the deal is that God opens the Book of Life on Rosh Hashanah and inscribes your name in it, but doesn’t close-and-seal it until the end of Yom Kippur. You have those ten Days of Awe to get your ducks in a row.

In recent times, people have taken to issuing blanket apologies for transgressions, presumably in the hope that anyone who’s actually suffered at their hands will happen by at the time the apology emerged, and will catch it in passing. And, of course, SoMe has amplified this impersonalization of what should be a very personal act of contrition.

I have never subscribed to the one-size-fits-all approach to giving or receiving apologies, but that’s just me. I mean—in the Roman Catholic Sacrament of Reconciliation, we’re meant to hawk up actual things we’ve done, say them out loud to the confessor and accept the penance we’re given. (Toughest priest I ever knew wouldn’t give you any generic Hail Marys or Our Fathers; no, no. If I’d been pissed off at my family, he’d tell me to go back and be specially nice to them. Killed me, he did.)

Anyhow, last week, my ex-manager emailed me to ask if we could reschedule a regular Wednesday morning meeting this week, on account of it being Yom Kippur. I said sure, adding, “May you be inscribed in the Book of Life. And your family.”

He replied, “Thank you. Please forgive me for any sins of omission or commission that I have committed, whether known to me or unknown.”

I suspect he’s being smart-assed. Pretty sure he doesn’t remember this, ah, incident, although it immediately sprang to my mind.

Jury’s still out on whether I forgive him.

Shroom-shroom

Hurricane Florence gave the District They Call Columbia a pass, but we’ve been getting a lot of rain, and it’s the tropical-temperatures kind of rain. You walk outside and your glasses steam up. Even in my house, where I’ve got two upstairs windows partway open, when you get halfway up the stairs, the bannister gets sticky.

So it’s no real surprise that fungi are having a field day around here.

For example, this mushroom growing atop one of the distance markers on the W&OD Trail:

And then I saw this profusion of little ones on one patch of my corporate neighbor’s campus:

So far no sign of a large boat with pairs of animals on it floating down the Toll Road, but I’m not ruling it out.

Gratitude Monday: bare feet on wood

It’s been almost three months since my living room floor flooded, courtesy of a gutter downspout that didn’t drain away from the house. And it’s been a month since I’ve had to live with the tarry subfloor that you can see in this video.

I won’t go right now into the whole michegoss of why it’s taken so long to complete the repairs (but if you want a recommendation on what flooring company not to use, give me a bell), because today’s Gratitude Monday, and I am so blissfully grateful that I have a new floor, and I can walk around the house barefoot.