2006-06-10
Counting Cars as a Highway Diversion
It occurs to me that my morning on-the-way-to-work entertainment has become a rather bad habit.You see, a while back, I decided to pass the time (since it's 23 miles or so each way, and in traffic can take up to two hours to get to and from work) by counting things.
I have no idea, don't ask.
First, I thought, I'd start by counting easy things, like, say, trucks.
20 of those miles are on a major highway.
You can imagine.
That became too depressing, and cumbersome as well, since I kept adding little stipulations like "has to have at least 10 wheels" or "can't be a local commercial truck". I had started out counting anything that was big enough to be obnoxious and blocked out major portions of my vision.
That got wayyyyy too depressing.
So, I eventually whittled the criteria down to 18 wheelers only.
Did I mention that on an average day, counting only the ones on the highway and not any of the ones in parking lots or truckyards or without the trailer bits attached, I would count around 250-300 of them?
Talk about depressing!
So ... it was time for a change.
I had noticed there were a few yellow cars around, where I hadn't noticed many before except for the one or two driven by obviously deranged attention-seekers. But their numbers seemed to be increasing, so I thought that was a good thing to be my next target.
Of course, I had to come up with various criteria for that, too.
At first I would count any yellow vehicle, but realized DHL trucks and Yellow Cabs (which are really orange) were everywhere, along with school busses. So the winnowing down of criteria began.
First, it had to be yellow.
Not orange, like the so-called "yellow cab" we have here. Not the deep yellow but not quite orange of a school bus.
Just yellow.
Do you have any idea how many shades of yellow there are?
At any rate, I then excluded any commercial vehicle, which took care of the preponderance of DHL trucks and such.
At one point I decided it had to be "on the hoof", so to speak, because otherwise it wasn't fair to count it.
But since the intent was to see how many people actually chose to drive a yellow vehicle, I figured it would have to be limited to (and include) ones that could be reasonably assumed were owned and operated by people who chose that color.
So, ones sitting in used car lots were out, as were any I saw being carried along on those big 18 wheeler car-carriers to their new corrals (yes I actually saw one that had six yellow cars on it at once!! Yikes!) But ones sitting in driveways or parking lots were OK.
Through all this process, I came to a frightening realization.
THEY ARE MULTIPLYING!!!
Yesterday I counted no less than 16 "on the hoof", just on the highway I shared, and not including any side streets, and another half dozen "resting" in parking lots and driveways, and not even counting the dozen or so in car lots I passed.
Where are they coming from????
No one even notices the red cars anymore, which at one time were said to be attractive to traffic cops.
Yellow?
The color of sunflowers and lemons and bumble bees and buttercups, butterflies and butter, and all those other yellow summery things you see every day.
In a car.
It's time to change targets. I've seen pink, purple, yellow and lime green cars now. (Mobile Easter Eggs!!!)
Maybe I should go back to counting plain, normal things.
I think I'll count crows :)
Mitakuye Oyasin