Ghost Rider in the Traffic Jam

A busy few weeks: Moved into a rental house, started a job, got a new car, worked at a trade show in London, and caught a cold.

We bought a car just before I started working, so for my first week's commute to work, I had to drive a rental, specifically a Kia Picanto. With a robust 1.1-litre engine, she really set the motorway on fire with her 60 mph of pure putt-putt.

Not that I could go the 70 mph speed limit, what with the traffic. I should say here that the commute isn't nearly as bad as I feared, but my first night coming home, there was an accident that closed the motorway just after my exit. It took me an hour and 45 minutes to get home; it usually takes somewhere around an hour -- maybe 10 minutes either side. One guy at work who lives not far from me said that one time he left work at 5:00 and got home at 10:30. I'm thinking I need to put together an M25 survival kit: pull-tab cans of beans, cereal bars, a blanket, water, an emergency pee container. Other ideas are welcome.

My new car is a Toyta Yaris diesel automatic. Now that I have an automatic, I'm very happy that all I have to think about is where I am on the road. Driving on the left is the easy part. The hard part? The roads are narrower, there's no such thing as a straight line, and there's a roundabout, like, every 100 feet. (No, not really, but on any given trip you can pretty much count on hearing "drive .8 miles then enter roundabout" coming out of the GPS speaker several times.)

After much consideration, I've named the new car 'Ghost Rider'. While not a motorcycle, I still hold out hope that the Yaris will one day have the ability to "travel between interdimensional realms and along any surface".

Ghost Rider and The Tangerine Dream.

Time Enough

I always got a chuckle out of what seemed like the national 'aversion to convenience' of the English. Things like mixing your own windscreen washer fluid from concentrate, instead of picking it up in a big jug in which it's already mixed. Or being able to buy ibuprofen only in packets of 16 instead of 150-pill bottles, or finding ways to dry your laundry on a rainy day when the clothesline isn't an option.

Look at toilet paper. In the States, we would buy it in packs of 48 rolls -- sometimes two at a time -- and keep the extra on a shelf in our basement. This was very convenient; we never ran out of toilet paper. At our local Waitrose, the largest package contains nine rolls. This is probably a good thing, since we have no basement, and our garage and third bedroom are currently filled with all of the stuff we brought with us and have no room for in a house that's half the size of what we had in Massachusetts. We need to become better at planning for our toilet paper needs.

In another example, drying laundry on a line should be done whenever possible. In my world that means on sunny days, or perhaps overcast and breezy. But this is England, where winters are cold, dark, and wet -- perfect for using a clothes dryer. The problem: they require space, and in a house where under-counter kitchen appliances consist of separate refrigerator and freezer, and a washing machine, there's no room. We have a condenser dryer, which is keeping our boxes of books company in the third bedroom. But even where people have dryers, the cost of electricity can make them expensive to run.

Things take time: mixing the fluid, making another trip to the store, hanging laundry, setting up and using the drying rack. It's worth reminding ourselves that for many reasons time is not, in fact, money. Nor does it free up cupboard space to stock up on food, water, and medicines in case of blizzard, epidemic, or zombies outside your door.