riding in LA traffic

i'm certainly no motorcycle expert, but I have been riding every day for the last 9 months. in that time, i've made a lot of changes to how I ride and how I drive a car.

as a motorcycle rider, my biggest fear and annoyance is the unpredictable driver. I can handle SUVs, trucks, minivans, people who drive too fast and people who drive too slow. they don't bother me. the unpredictable ones - the guy who suddenly jumps on his brake when I can see there is nothing in front of him - the dude who makes a swerving lane change with no signal and no traffic or places to turn in front - the old lady who pulls out of a parking lot and crosses into the lane i'm in instead of the lane closest to the curb... these people freak me out.

I can handle idiots who drive too aggressively - they are easy to predict, and I can just let 'em on by. people on cell phones are usually predictably bad. that's fine - as long as I can tell what you're gonna do 5 seconds before you do it, you're cool in my book.

eerie

I've been poking around on this site, checking out the various live traffic cameras located in and around Houston. I've been to Houston and experienced the evil traffic they've got there, so it's a little extra creepy to click on one camera after another to see nothing but empty highways - some of them 8 and 10 lanes wide.

sternutation

this past weekend, I had a lot of time to think about a lot of things. mostly important things, but occasionally my mind wanders. one of those wanderings was because of a sneezing fit.

I sneeze a lot. i'm allergic to a lot of things in life, and I generally don't like to take drugs unless I really have to. so I sneeze. a lot. some days, I sneeze as many as 30 times, and they usually come in bunches of 3 or 4, sometimes as many as 7, one right after another.

so this leads me to do a little math... figure an average of 12 sneezes a day (that's a conservative estimate), which works out to 60 per week, 240 per month, 4,380 per year, and about 113,880 since my allergy problems started when I was about 8 years old.

that's a lotta sneezing.