Archive for January 9th, 2025
Trafficking
Thursday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Another day, another Doctor’s appointment. This time around, it was a checkup with my heart guy, which unfortunately was scheduled during what it would turn out to be a snow storm. Pittsburgh has been getting hit, day after day, with lake effect bands of snow that drop an inch or two of the white stuff and air temperatures which have seldom risen out of the 20’s and are hitting single digits at night. Ice, ice, baby.
They do a fairly decent job of plowing and salting hereabouts, but Pittsburgh’s odd terrain – with its steep hills and valleys – has to factor into how you route your journey. Or – it doesn’t, and you slide off of a cliff or a roadway that’s angled at twenty to thirty degrees against the next intersection – some 500 feet in differential altitude from where you started.
Luckily, the Mobile Oppression Platform – a Toyota – offers a transmission setting called ‘Trail’ which activates full ‘all wheel drive’ and reduces the amount of torque going into the wheels, which in turn increases traction. It’s meant for driving on gravel or dirt roads, this mode, but it works fantastically well in ice and snow. I lose a few miles worth of gas mileage in ‘trail’ mode, moving from just above 43 mpg down to about 39 mpg.
It’s worth the spend, if you’d ask me. Nobody does.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This particular appointment necessitated about a 25 minute drive from HQ. I was heading for the neighborhood of Bloomfield, which was founded on a prominence that’s part of a plateau over the Allegheny River. The shot above makes it look like there was a lot of traffic, but we were stacked up at a stop light. Snow was falling pretty steadily.
As mentioned yesterday, due to the weather and factoring in my recovery for the broken ankle, one is being super careful while moving around. I’m literally not myself at the moment. Walking slowly and with a limp, when I encounter a patch of compacted snow or ice it becomes a major obstacle to my continued happiness. Yup, the car and I are married right now.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
After arriving in Bloomfield, characteristically far too early for my appointment, one secured a metered parking spot and had a very short walk of about three blocks ‘there and back.’ Given my current ‘state,’ this was exhausting. When I left HQ, one of my goals for the day was to ‘come back with some photos of “something.” I knew I wasn’t going to be ‘making art’ shooting through the windshield of a car, but…
After my long hibernation, any and all ‘lead time’ on photos has been erased and I’m practically doing Pentacle live right now. Normally, I’m at least a couple of weeks ahead of myself, but…
Back tomorrow.
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