winterbadger | Entries tagged with roads

The road menders did a very good job fixing the mess that WASA had made of our street. They detoured people out onto the mostly unpaved shoulder on the far side of the street while they were working, but everyone could get in and out and no one seems to have accidentally driven into the creek (which is on that side of the street).

Driving out past the work, I could see that appalling mess that the water board people had made. Basically, they tore off the road surface, chopped a big hole through the roadbed, dug a big hole through the ground under it to get to the main, then just filled in the hole with dirt and rubble to the level of the road surface and put some macadam down on top of that. No effort to repair the roadbed, no effort to grade the surface before tarmacking it. I think my nephews know how to repair a road better than that, and they're five!

So, thank you WASA for fixing the water main break, but no thanks for doing such a crap job of clearing up.

And thank you, road menders for clearing up after *them*!

Now waiting to see how the gas tap has been painted over this time...

Last time they were like Sir Lancelot attacking the castle in Monty Python and the Holy Grail--always running up and never arriving.

This time, it's an episode of "guerrilla road menders" as they show up (almost literally) at dawn, with no warning.

Now, I'm happy to have them come. When the water company people came, they ripped a huge hole in the street to fix the main, but only filled in about half of it, so it's been like driving across the Serengeti to go out of our street.

But a *little* notice might have been nice. I have no idea how they're going to fix the hole without blocking the entire street to traffic. And this is a one-way street with a park at the other end. 80-90% of the people who live on the street are on the "wrong" side of the hole.

Oh, well, we'll see what happens.

Meanwhile, we're all Flanders and Swan here.

"They fixed the gushing water main
We cheered them one and all,
But now we've got the menders in
To fill the bloody hole.

Oh, it all makes work
For the working man to do,"

Not that I've been in a fit on thanklessness...

For Friday, I am thankful for, of all things, our highway system. I had to work late, and when I was done and on my way home, since it was long after commuting hours, I was able to jump on the Dulles Toll Road, take it to the Beltway (the section of Interstate highway that runs around DC, and ride around the north side of the city to the state road that takes me home. It's a comparatively long way to go every day, but when there's little traffic, I can go back and forth fairly quickly. Our roads mean that I when I had to switch from one job in my company to a new one, I could do that without having to move house. I'm grateful for that.

For Saturday, I am thankful for the friends I share my hobbies with.

gr_c17 and The Attorney came over, and we spent the afternoon and evening working on various gaming projects. B had some wee sci fi troopers he was painting; E was finishing off his second DBA army--New Kingdom Egyptians--while I did bits of work on a couple of DBA commands (nearing completion/revision of the Fatimid Egyptians, landscaping the bases of my Sassanid Persians, turning a tower model I got a while back into a camp), and readying my WWI Russian Baltic Fleet for painting (they're 1/2400 scale models, so even the limited assembly I had to do was rather fiddly). We drank coffee, ate lunch, chatted about all sorts of things--it was a nice, low-key way to spend an afternoon.

For Sunday, I am thankful for the great parks we have all over the DC area. I grumble sometimes about how hard it is to get to the one I want to or how the constant stream of "development" (i.e., the building of more and more soulless townhouse or SFH tracts) impinges on them, but there are a remarkably decent number of fairly large parks, the kind where you can wander for hours and not hear much in the way of traffic, other than the occasional aircraft overhead, where there are many wild birds, deer, and smaller mammals to enjoy seeing and hearing. I went for a ramble in one park yesterday with

redactrice after we'd had a nice picnic with

shy_kat (whose twisted ankle is still preventing her from joining in ambles :-( We saw chipmunks and titmice and heard flickers and woodpeckers. We swinked up hill and down dale, managing to avoid sliding in the occasional mud patch and enjoying the chilly, mostly leafless woods of Maryland.