Road Hazards

Hello,

Yesterday when I came to work I saw a blind man walking along the sidewalk in front of the library. I was so surprised to see someone in Ely using the cane for blind people that I failed to look both directions when crossing the street and only saw the approaching red van before I got to the middle of the street. Plenty of time was there for me to stop and wait for them to pass before I proceeded. How ironic that would have been to have been hit by a car as I was distracted by a blind person.

As I was driving home another unusual car incident occurred.  I had just passed an exit on the interstate when I noticed a car pulled off to the right side and moving slowly. As I was in the right lane, cars were beside me, and I wanted to get off at the next exit, I slowed down a bit. Just as I was quite close to that vehicle they slowly pulled in front of me. I slammed on my brakes while the car behind me blew their horn as if that would help the situation. Even when the car was fully in the lane it did not go the speed limit, as most are want to do. I could see that there were large chucks of blown off semi tire on the edge of the road and that is why they moved over. Why they did not use a surge of power, I could not imagine as they surely saw me coming.

When my exit came they moved into it ahead of me. As we went down the ramp and stopped at the light I could see that they had a temporary license from Illinois. Being out of town and perhaps unfamiliar with the area does explain some behavior, but I think it might have been wise to just get onto the slower moving side streets where they could contemplate their situation.

Not that it was on the road, but a strange thing happened in my head. I have a tendency to interpolate numbers. While at the library a patron told me his library number. We only use up to four digits, consequently many people have their number memorized. Part of the number was 15. Just as I was entering it in the computer I could feel my brain switching the number to 51 while another brain part won over that force and made it 15. I have never experience that before. Usually it just ends up to be 51 without any noticeable stopping on my part. A man once told me that he also switched numbers around and they are almost always divisible by 3. Don’t we have amazing minds even when they are not working properly?

Paula