Category Archives: traffic

Traffic in Chicago Is Tough on Everyone

From the Chicago Sun-Times:

Traffic tip for the days ahead: If you see a motorcade with police cars, black SUVs and guys with sunglasses talking into their cuffs, don’t try to cut it off.

One couple tried to drive their tan sedan around Barack Obama’s motorcade downtown Thursday morning and found themselves looking at the barrels of Secret Service firepower.

“The [Secret Service] SUV cut the car off immediately, and the security team aimed their weapons at the car,” a reporter in the motorcade wrote in a pool report. “The driver and passenger in the sedan stopped and looked stunned — until the male driver appeared to understand what was happening (your pool reporter could see him mouth ‘Obama’).”

The president-elect was on his way to a security briefing at FBI headquarters in the Loop, when the motorcade left Lake Shore Drive and the sedan tried to drive around it on Van Buren, according to the pool reporter, P.J. Huffstutter, the Los Angeles Times’ Midwest Bureau chief.

“Some of the drivers here in Chicago do not seem to understand that a) The Chicago police car at the end of the president-elect’s motorcade is serious about having traffic pull over when the officers flash their lights and hit their sirens, and b) It’s not a great idea to jump ahead of traffic by trying to cut around the black SUV filled with five heavily-armed Secret Service CAT members,” Huffstutter wrote.

Um, whoops

Overheard on this morning’s traffic report:

And on the Kennedy, a dump truck flipped over and spilled a bunch of dirtbags into the roadway. Um, bags of dirt. Topsoil, I mean.

Gotta keep those lowlifes off the freeways 🙂

Stressed/Not So Stressed

And so the week trudges on. Yay.

The last two days were rather stressful. On Monday I was inundated with MFF-related stuff, and tried to get it all cleared away, with mixed success. At the same time the pressure was on at work to get some documents out, and now it appears that they will be up for review next Wednesday – my last day before my MFF “vacation”. I had hoped to leave early that day – I hope it can get through with minimal corrections. In the evening, both Takaza and I were snappish, and we stayed up for too late talking over convention-related stuff with Linnaeus

Yesterday, work was hectic again. Afterwards I had a doctor’s appointment in Vernon Hills (see my next post for that). I didn’t get out from there until 4:45 PM, and in the meantime it appeared that someone has dropped a big ol’ stupid bomb on all of the northern suburbs of Chicago. The expressways were completely stopped, and I wound up having to go off to surface streets, and even then I pretty much had my very-detailed road atlas open because I had to do some exotic navigation*. I didn’t get home until just before 6:30.

Dan had beat me home (that’s pretty unusual), and he met me at the door. After helping me take my jacket off, he led me back to the bedroom and gave me the most wonderful back- and foot-rub ever. And to top it off, he made dinner, too! My husband is pretty damn wonderful, I think. I took a break from MFF stuff for the night and found that helped a lot, too.

So today, it’s back to work, nose to the grindstone, blah blah blah. I have some scheduling to work out (I had everything exactly right, then there was a slight change and someone yelled “JENGA!” and the whole thing fell apart). Still, the reason for the change is a good one and the net outcome is better so I don’t really have any complaints.

* {Take a deep breath} Tri-State (wait in backup) to Edens Spur (wait in backup) to Waukegan Road (wait in backup) to Dundee to Meadow to Shermer to Willow to Patriot to Chestnut to Lehigh to Harlem to Oakton to Central to Howard to Lincoln to Jersey to Kedzie to Carmen to Troy to HOME!

See, this is why I like organizing events – it lets me get all of my recreational stress out of the way. Yeah, that’s it. I woke up with a coughing fit at 3:20 AM this morning and was unable to get back to sleep, though I might have dozed slightly between 4:30 and 5, when the alarm went off. Don’t ask what I was worrying about, it was all silly stuff (did we remember to do X? Do we have enough Y?) that was quickly dispatched with a few questions once takaza woke up. It’s safe to assume that I won’t be staying up late tonight.

And now there’s the long day ahead. I wish I was buried in work, so the day would fly by. Sadly, I’m not so much buried as I have work up to about my ankles. There’s a few nice things about being underemployed, but boredom on the job is not one of them.

As long as I’m whining, I’ll throw this out: what the heck is going on with morning traffic? Back in the summer, leaving the house at 6:10 AM got me here by about 6:40 or so. It seems that since about the beginning of this month traffic at that early hour has really increased, to the point where it was stop and go on I-94 (Edens Expressway) this morning, and I got here at 6:50. Yeah, it’s just another ten minutes, but where the heck are these people coming from, and why are they out so early? And, most importantly, why can’t they GET THE F**K OUT OF MY WAY?

Ahem. Sorry about that. Anyway, that’s what’s going on right now. Long day, but the fun starts at 3:30 PM!