Lessons Learned

What I learned over the weekend:

1. When little boys say they're "okay," they're not
2. You should never take sick boys snowboarding
3. If you do take sick boys snowboarding, you should have sickness bags in your car
4. Said sickness bags should be easily accessible (vs. in the trunk)
5. When you remind little boys that your car is new and ask if you need to pull over, you should pull over regardless of their response
6. When little boys change their minds and state that they're feeling a bit sick, they mean it
7. The timeframe between starting to ask mom to pull over and puking is approximately one-tenth of one second in duration (rendering a complete sentence obsolete)
8. Gatorade-laden vomit isn't nearly as stinky or chunky as other types
9. Gatorade-laden vomit washes out of new car upholstery and snow gear fairly easy
10. Some days, it's good to be back at work

Safe but Not Sound

Winter mornings in Rochester consist of driving along the highway, steering your car quickly around large clumps of hardened snow that the semi in front of you just deposited on the road, and passing car after car after car that somehow ended up in a ditch on the side of the road or backwards/upside-down in the median. Police cars lit up. Tow trucks everywhere.

But that doesn't slow us down. Nope. It doesn't matter that the speed limit is 65, the roads are covered in black ice, 40 mile per hour howling winds are blowing snow across your windscreen and there's a hazardous weather outlook in place: you still need to drive as fast as possible, pass, cut people off and slam on your breaks when some idiot in front of you is doing the speed limit. No need to put down the cell phone. Multitasking is cool.

Come on people, you're going to make me late for that critical meeting that, this time next week, I'll have forgotten all about.

As I approached my office, the car in front of me was doing 25 in a 40 mph zone. Hey, what's with the caution? Can't see the road through the sleet? Then I noticed the out-of-state plates and I wondered what it must be like for someone unaccustomed to extreme driving to be thrown into the lunacy here. Would it be like lacing up my ice skates and trying to compete in an Olympic speed skating event? No, because at least they're all headed in the same direction.

Maybe I would understand more clearly if I was battling asteroids from a single passenger spacecraft. Or if I was suddenly thrown, without warning, into a Rugby game, say the Barbarians vs. New Zealand, and I had the ball.

It's all so very Norman Rockwell around here in the wintertime.