Back into the fog.

And no,  this isn’t going to be another attempt at explaining how I like 220 over 110.   We’re going to leave that one alone. 

A week ago or so I guess it was,  Travelling Companion mentioned that she had to be in the Czech Republic on Friday morning for a couple interviews.  I take it she has the final say in the case of a couple people they’re looking to hire.  Something like that.

When we started to work out the travelling time,  it would have meant leaving here at some silly hour.  She was willing to do this on her own,  but I’ve had misgivings about sending her off on her own in those situations in the past,  and with the temperatures dropping in these parts, well I think you know where I’m going with this.

Personally I’m not too annoyed with leaving at a “silly hour”,  and I’ve done that many times in the past.  By getting away early in the morning,  at least there’s the thought that eventually the sun will come up, and you won’t be driving in darkness for long.   Of course,  it’s heaps better when you’re getting up at some silly hour and then being picked up by a cab or limo,  to then be whisked off to the airport,  followed by a flight to some sunny destination,  but I realise that those kinds of thoughts are just a product of some sort of weather funk that we all start to go through here in the Northern Hemispheres as Winter approacheth.

I’ll try to lighten up.  We’ll get our reward in June.  Thankfully.

 

So that means I have the car today (big whoop)  and I’ll be heading out to fetch Travelling Companion from the salt mines at our prearranged time of 5:30. p.m. (the p.m. is kind of redundant,  don’t you think?)  

That also means a couple hours of not only driving in the dark,  but by the looks of things,  also driving in the fog.  We thought the lesser of two evils was to go up and stay there over night,  and then it’s just a short jaunt into the Czech Republic in the morning. 

When it comes to driving, there’s really and truly only one thing that makes me use all the concentration that I can muster,  and that’s limited visibility.  Both of us have realised that driving at night is a challenge these days,  and adding some fog or snow falling just makes it that much more “peachy”.  

I actually don’t mind driving on ice or snow.  It might possibly have something to do with spending the first few years of my life in a province like Nova Scotia?  I don’t know,  but as long as I can see who’s coming,  and which side of the road they’ve decided to drive on,  it’s not that big a deal.  It used to be though,  that it was better if I did that kind of driving all by my lonesome,  since there was at least one occasion (and this was way back,  when just driving in Toronto would send T.C. off the deep end) when I actually had to have someone move to the back seat,  since she was freaking out so much.  I’m not kidding.   These days,  I can be doing 200 k.p.h on and Autobahn in Germany,  and she’ll be fiddling around with her crackberry.   Completely at ease.  

I’m not sure what happened.  It either took her 30 years to figure that I could in fact drive a car,  or perhaps she figures the kids are old enough to fend for themselves,  and she’s willing to let the chips fall where they may. 

 

So that’s the big “excitement”  for today.  Here’s hoping the weather forecast is wrong,  and the fog between here and Gmünd has magically disappeared.  I wouldn’t bet on it.   If you click the link,  you can follow our route.  I’m sure you care.   Of course,  IF you click that link, it still shows Gmünd as ‘Gmunden’.   In spite of actually getting a reply back from one of the dullards at Google a few weeks back that they would fix this error,  they’ve only made it worse,  by now having the Google maps search engine take you to Gmunden,  when you plug in Gmünd.   *sigh*

Kind of like when we’d have the I.T. guys come in to the school for whatever “upgrade”  we were deemed to get (I almost wrote “doomed”)  and we’d then discover that they had made things worse.   So it was important to try and open just about all the important programs BEFORE they made their escape.  Just a minor thing really,  but it would save having to wait another few days for them to come back again.  See,  if I can’t open the program that allows me to the send off a “repair ticket”,  then how am I ever going to get my computer to work?  Should I bring one from home?  (I actually offered to do that once,  they didn’t like that)  It got to the point with the computer that I had in my office,  that I actually found one that was a cast off from a school we had closed,  cannibalised the motherboard from the thing and got my computer back.  I had to recreate a bunch of stuff that I had set up for the sake of convenience (and I lost my dreamy screen saver of some resort we stayed at in The Dominican Republic),  but that was hardly a problem.   Gets to the point when,  if you figure you’ve got nothing to lose,  they you may as well go for it. 

I really don’t mean to start slagging off on I.T. folks,  since in the case of my previous employer,  they were all for the most part very personable types,  but were quite often set upon my the higher ups to flit from location to location as expeditiously as possible to “get the job done”.   With over 80 schools,  that’s no mean feat.

I could really go off on a rant about some of the expectations of the “higher ups”,  but I don’t want to put you to sleep.

 

I haven’t decided if I’ll take the computer with me tonight.  The internet at the Goldener Stern is just a tad slow,  but usually fast enough to eventually upload a blog post.   Mind you, this is where Live Writer really shines.

Note the address in that web page?   See,  I do know where the hell I’m going,  and it’s not “Gmunden”.   Gah!

 

Keep it between the ditches.   I know I’ll try.

 

Thanks for stopping by.

 

.