Friday, August 28, 2009

When did the "yield" rule change?

What a difference low humidity makes. I had my regular session at senior fitness yesterday and the time went extremely well. When I left the house, the temperature was just under 60 degrees but the real story was the lack of humidity. It had gone away during Wednesday night.

All those arthritic and rebuilt joints I have didn’t get completely dried out in the short time the humidity left, but without the continued aggravation exercising was much easier. I heard Roger Griswold in Channel Six say yesterday that we had seen the last of the humidity. I wasn’t paying quite enough attention to catch if that were for the rest of the season or just for a few days. It was welcome, though.

The real message of his weather forecast was that we are probably in for another wet, possibly wild weekend, especially the Saturday part. Bill last weekend will be followed this weekend by another potentially bad boy, Danny. If this latest tropical storm follows the path of Bill, we could see more high waves along the coast along with some rain and possibly some wind, but we’ll once again luck out on real damage. Today's forecast indicated what's left of Danny will join with another storm coming in from the West to produce heavy rains tomorrow. Then, perhaps the sun will return Sunday.

Yes, I know some of you are asking how I can say we didn’t have much damage from Bill. Most of the storm problems we had, especially that in inland Western Maine, was the result of a weather front that passed through from the west.

Of course conditions have changed since yesterday, as they often do when dealing with a potential storm, so we must always remember that we won’t know what will happen with the weather until it happens. As the weekend approaches, keep in mind that a storm of some sort is not far away in the Atlantic and watch those skies carefully.

I try to keep up with driving laws, especially new ones, but one must have gotten by me sometime in the last few years. While out yesterday travelling along I-295, at three different interchanges traffic coming up the on-ramp never slowed down to get into a travel lane. One driver even accelerated his car in order to be able to get onto the main road ahead of me.

I guess I missed the change in the yield law that gave ramp traffic the right-of-way.

I also think there’s a possibility I wasn’t paying quite enough attention as I missed whether the drivers in each of the instances even checked to see if there were oncoming traffic. I realize the driver of the car that sped up obviously must have checked because he had to actually accelerate to get ahead of me.

I was too busy keeping track of the traffic to check to see if any of the drivers were using a cell phone at the time, but I wouldn’t take any bets they weren’t. It just occurred to me. I wonder if these drivers that tried to force me into a new car yesterday were the same ones that try to wipe me out by racing through red lights at intersections. Hmmmmm.

Somehow I have a suspicion I will ignore this “law change” and continue to be cautious…and yield…when I’m entering a highway.

GiM

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