May 04, 2008
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CB monitoring pays off
I don't usually monitor the squawky CB but this afternoon I had it on for a while and I got lucky. As I was approaching Dayton OH eastbound on I-70 conversation began to center on a tie-up just east of the I-75 interchange. When it began to dawn on me I could spend the next hour or so creeping through the mess or I could spend it in my livingroom (ah, the joys of having a home on your back) with a cup of coffee I pulled off at the next exit.
A little Googling turned up a couple of traffic cameras that showed traffic backed up. Bleck! It might take a while for traffic to get moving again and at 4:30 in the afternoon the alternate routes don't much appeal to me. Generally I don't like to backtrack but it's only 3 miles back to the Wal-Mart in Englewood, OH. It's time to call it a day.
A meijer hypermarket
By chance when I exited I-70 I ended up at the meijer hypermarket in Englewood. Put Wal-Mart Superstores in a design competition with this meijer hypermarket and the meijer wins hands down. This is one good looking design. While cut from the same hypermarket cloth this is a nice fresh store with nice fresh produce in a larger grocery section than Wal-Mart's. These stores are so similar in concept one might wonder which came first - who's borrowing from whom here?
Night camp:
Wal-Mart parking lot, Englewood, Ohio
A Siberian dog signal-howl
A camp in the middle of a clear, dark winter's night presents a strange, wild appearance. I was awakened, soon after midnight, by cold feet, and, raising myself upon one elbow, I pushed my head out of my frosty fur bag to see by the stars what time it was. The fire had died away to a red heap of smouldering embers. There was just light enough to distinguish the dark outlines of the loaded sledges, the fur-clad forms of our men, lying here and there in groups about the fire, and the frosty dogs, curled up into a hundred little hairy balls upon the snow. Away beyond the limits of the camp stretched the desolate steppe in a series of long snowy undulations, which blended gradually into one great white frozen ocean, and were lost in the distance and darkness of night. High overhead, in a sky which was almost black, sparkled the bright constellations of Orion and the Pleiades--the celestial clocks which marked the long, weary hours between sunrise and sunset. The blue mysterious streamers of the aurora trembled in the north, now shooting up in clear bright lines to the zenith, then waving back and forth in great majestic curves over the silent camp, as if warning back the adventurous traveller from the unknown regions around the Pole. The silence was profound, oppressive. Nothing but the pulsating of the blood in my ears, and the heavy breathing of the sleeping men at my feet, broke the universal lull. Suddenly there rose upon the still night air a long, faint, wailing cry like that of a human being in the last extremity of suffering. Gradually it swelled and deepened until it seemed to fill the whole atmosphere with its volume of mournful sound, dying away at last into a low, despairing moan. It was the signal-howl of a Siberian dog; but so wild and unearthly did it seem in the stillness of the arctic midnight, that it sent the startled blood bounding through my veins to my very finger-ends. In a moment the mournful cry was taken up by another dog, upon a higher key--two or three more joined in, then ten, twenty, forty, sixty, eighty, until the whole pack of a hundred dogs howled one infernal chorus together, making the air fairly tremble with sound, as if from the heavy bass of a great organ. For fully a minute heaven and earth seemed to be filled with yelling, shrieking fiends. Then one by one they began gradually to drop off, the unearthly tumult grew momentarily fainter and fainter, until at last it ended as it began, in one long, inexpressibly melancholy wail, and all was still.