I've been taking my lunch at home recently-- I live less than a mile from work, and if I drive up the hill to home I can eat and have a Moxie and smoke a cigarette and see Helen and save a bundle in lunch money. Oh yeah!
Driving home, however, at lunchtime, even though it's about 6 blocks, can be a challenge. Downtown Portland in the summer (especially this summer) is going through a big construction and maintenance boom. Add to that the normal daytime-- lunchtime-- foot traffic and cars and pickup trucks full of contractors driving through, and it's sometimes a real zoo and really slow going. But what I really really hate is the people from out of town. You can tell them by the deer in the headlights look they always have. They cut off pedestrians in the crosswalks, they don't use their blinkers, they don't use the separate turn-off lanes (Portland seems to them to be one, big, single lane street), they run yellow lights (and red lights) and then they stop in the middle of a lane in the middle of a block to let some huge, lumbering behemoth of a person get out and waddle and jiggle up onto the curb while the light is green. And then, when Jaba the Hut is safely on their way to their bank or chiropractor, they speed right up back into the traffic lane, as if they hadn't really stopped there at the stupid curb in the first place. They hate the traffic conditions, but they're the source of the bad conditions. Grrrrr...
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