Physics in Action

I was driving home from an enjoyable day spent with Stew and decided to take the "back way" home. The road (don't ask me the name of it-- has the Martello Tower and the school on it) is narrow to begin with, but with the ice and snow piled up on one side was even narrower.

As I drove up the road, around the bend came... a public bus. Large, square, many-ton piece of steel, rubber, and glass. A quick mental calculation of the amount of room it needed and the amount of room I needed and the amount of street available indicated that there was not enough room by far for the two of us.

Thinking fast, I cautiously applied the brakes and drove up onto the snow/ice bank, which happened to (luckily) be wider and flatter in that area. By doing so, the bus driver had just enough room to squeeze by on the other side of the road, and I cautiously drove back down onto the part of street that was clear. I'm not sure what we would have done had I not thought fast enough and determined I could do that maneuver safely enough. The bus was going way too fast around the bend to have stopped in time; guess he didn't expect oncoming traffic on that bend or on that road. I might have stopped, but I'm not sure what that would have accomplished if the bus couldn't stop. Glad neither of us had to find out.

As I drove down Westgate toward our house, the same basic situation applied to the street (not wide enough due to ice/snow buildup on the sides). However, in this instance, a person had decided to park his SUV on one side of the narrowed street and another parked his car on the opposite side. And, of course, they didn't park as close to the ice/snow as they could, because they each must have had passengers who needed to disembark. So what is a narrow two lane road normally was now an ice-slick hazardous slalom course between two parked cars. Not sure what the drivers were thinking. Had there been a car coming, there is no doubt at all that only one of us could have gone through at a time. As it was, a car came up as I cleared the obstacle and I slid on the ice trying to get back from the center of the lane onto "my side" of the road, which, of course, is the side with the most ice build up. Luckily the oncoming traffic recognized the situation, slowed and got to his right, and gave me the room I needed to maneuver the slide and get out of his way.

And I won't even mention the ice/snow build up on Gaelic, which I am a little worried that M's car won't be able to power through on her way home. My truck had trouble with it.

Talking with Alex the other day, he was mentioning that our neighbors thanked him the other day for his plowing. They recognize how lucky they are that he comes to plow out our driveway on snowy days. Doing so frequently means he is the first and, sometimes, only, plow that Gaelic and Erin Court sees. Without him plowing his way in to us and plowing his way out again, many of them wouldn't be able to go to work in the morning.

I also helped Stew with the spreading of salt on his driveway, and he taught me how to spread the salt so I can do a better job on our own. Maybe, now that I understand the quantity and purpose of it, I can do a better job on our ice rink... er, I mean "driveway" in the future.