I tested out my potential commute to the west side of Akron today.

It was almost exactly 30 minutes from walking out of my door to arriving at the parking lot. That's about 5-8 minutes longer than my previous non-rush hour tests. I left at 7:30 on the assumption that I would need to arrive for work at 8:00 am - I'm not exactly sure that's the case, but I'll know soon enough and it seems the most likely start time. That should have been just about the peak traffic period.

I can tolerate 30 minutes of highway driving, and the traffic wasn't too horrendous, so I'm pretty certain I'm just going to stay in my current apartment for another year and not move just yet.

The traffic was dispersed a little differently than I expected though.

The route was basically:

1) take Graham Road through Stow to Route 8
2) take Route 8 south through downtown Akron to I-76/77 at the Central Interchange
3) take I-76/77 west across Akron
4) take I-77 north to the exit

I thought that the busiest area would be the Central Interchange and I-76, but that proved not to be the case. There was a lot of volume in Stow and getting on the highway, and then Route 8 got very busy Howe Avenue, and stayed that way until the Perkins Avenue exit downtown. Then it cleared up quite a bit. The Central Interchange was no problem, I-76 wasn't that bad, and then it picked up again just a bit on I-77.

I tested out one possible "surface roads only" route to come home and that took me 37 minutes.

I think 30 minutes is tolerable. More than that would be less than ideal, but I think I was super spoiled with my previous 2-mile commute to Hudson.

Of course, there were no accidents. There was some construction. I can see how an accident could mess that all up. Welcome to the real world of driving to work, Dave.

current weather: Cloudy, 48, Wind: NE 3, Rain today: 0.08"; I must have gotten used to the warm temperatures because the 40s seem real cold now

Tags: akron, commute, traffic, work
Current Location: 41.197N 81.433W
Current Mood: accomplished
Current Music: none

Today I made a Northeast Ohio loop with Gregg in order to add some courthouses to my collection, and extend our normal Sunday hike.

I have enough counties now that I'm also looking to improve some of the pictures I already took. Some were taken with my old camera, others were taken in bad weather, or with bad lighting or I just don't like the photos.

Cuyahoga County is one of those - I have a photo of it, but it was taken in the rain with my old camera. I've never actually uploaded it to Flickr. So I started with that one today.


It was a great day today weather-wise. I was a little concerned it would be chilly but it turned out pretty warm and mostly clear. After stopping by the Cuyahoga County courthouse in downtown Cleveland we headed out on I-90 towards Ashtabula County.

I was really hungry, I hadn't eaten yet. So I pulled off the highway in Mentor hoping to find food, without much luck. We did find a place to hike though, the Mentor Lagoon, a nature preserve, wetlands area and marina.

The Ashtabula County courthouse isn't in Ashtabula, as I mistakenly thought when I visited there with Terry and Liz previously. It's actually in Jefferson, a very small town south of Ashtabula.


Then we drove south to Warren. I was really, really hungry at that point, but we still hadn't really found anything good by the time we got into town. I have to say, the Trumbull County courthouse was pretty impressive:

Summit County and Portage County actually used to be part of Trumbull County, but they were split off long before this courthouse was built in 1895. I only know that though because "ERECTED 1895" is in big letters on the front. Also, upon looking at my full-size picture I think I see something that looks exactly like a DirecTV antenna in the clocktower...

At that point we started heading towards Youngstown. In Niles we found a mall, but even better, a Bob Evans, where I ate a delicious long-delayed breakfast at about 4:00 in the afternoon.

I wasn't exactly sure where the Mahoning County courthouse was, but we found it after just a little bit of wandering around downtown Youngstown. I really liked the inscription, which is the subject of this post.


Then we drove back to Akron, where I finally managed to take a decent picture of the Summit County courthouse. I've been doing this for a few years now, and I live in Summit County, but I've never taken a good photograph of it, because it was under scaffolding for renovation at one point, and it faces west, so pictures taken in the morning have terrible lighting (like my picture of the Mahoning County courthouse above, sigh). But by going in the afternoon, I finally had good lighting.


We wandered around North Hill a bit where Gregg tried to ID the house he first lived in, got some Dairy Queen, and then I took Gregg home. This was a pretty successful day, I think the only Northeast Ohio county courthouse that I need another picture of is Medina County. I took that photo right at sunset and so it looks kind of weird.

Also, it feels nice to have actually accomplished something, anything, right now.

current weather: Clear, 51, Wind: calm

Tags: akron, cleveland, county courthouses, gregg, jefferson, mentor, northeast ohio, photos, roadtrip, warren, youngstown
Current Location: 41.197N 81.433W
Current Mood: accomplished
Current Music: Final Fantasy VI - Fanfare

CC Sabathia won the American League Cy Young Award today - only the second Indians pitcher ever to do so (the other was Gaylord Perry in 1972). That's really awesome, and Indians pitcher Fausto Carmona even came in fourth place.

It's great, although unfortunately Sabathia and Carmona didn't pitch all that well in the playoffs. It's possible that Boston's Josh Beckett would have won had the voting taken place AFTER the playoffs, but it didn't. And Sabathia and Carmona both had amazing seasons.

I was listening to the press conference this evening while I was in my car, and the person running the press conference clearly had no idea how to pronounce the names of Ohio cities correctly. I had several chuckles at his expense, although I realize I'm the last person that should be making fun of that sort of thing. Still, it came across as very unprofessional at the very least.

He pronounced Akron like:

"a-KRON" (which is how Dr. Hazelton always used to pronounce it, even though he knew better, and seems to be the preference of those with a British accent as well)

Whereas I think the more generally used pronunciation is "ACK-rin" Yes, it would appear based on the spelling that the first option is correct, but it's not.

The best though was Canton, which he pronounced like:

"kan-TAHN"

... or like the old English name for the city of Guangzhou, China. Which would make sense, after all, because Canton WAS in fact named for that city.

But if there's one rule to follow here, it's that if an Ohio city is named after another world city, it's almost certainly pronounced differently, whether it be LAI-ma, to-LEE-doh, or BUR-lin, etc.

As for me personally, I pronounce Canton "KAN-tin," although I've been told from people outside of the area that people around here don't even say the "T" sound at all, but say something closer to "KAN'in."

I've even been told that I say it that way, although I don't totally buy that. I'm definitely making a "T" sound in there. At least I think.

Aside: in writing all this I discovered that Canton, although continuing to lose population, has overtaken Youngstown as the 8th-largest city in Ohio, because Youngstown (which at one point was considerably larger than Canton) is losing population much faster.

current weather: Clear, 50, Wind: S 7; A warm front went through yesterday and brought rain - I'm kind of surprised at how many trees still have bright color

Tags: akron, baseball, canton, cleveland indians, cy young, english language, grammar, ohio
Current Location: 41.197N 81.433W
Current Mood: enthralled
Current Music: none

Today has been an exceptionally weird day. From start to finish it has been full of the bizarre and surreal. I kept thinking I never actually got out of bed in the first place.

It begins quite literally around midnight - I haven't been sleeping all that well this last week or so, I have no idea why. I think maybe the work hours were doing it to me somehow. I was getting home so late, but was determined to still actually do something and kept going to sleep too late. When I did manage to sleep, I was having really vivid dreams, and a lot of confusion/sleepwalking episodes.

In particular, I've really been suffering from the "wake up, am very confused and think that I'm about to die" version of nightmare/sleepwalk.

Now, thankfully as of the last few days, I'm still not sleeping very well, but at least the dreams have been getting more and more to the positive side of things. But even still, last night I kept waking up, kept having really strange dreams, thankfully none of which I remember right now.

At 6:30 am, I woke up momentarily. My alarm wasn't scheduled to go off until 7:00, so I was a little surprised, but not terribly so, because I had been waking up all night. I was, however, surprised at how light it seemed. I've since checked - sunrise was at 6:28 am. So in theory the sun *was* up, but I have no idea why it was so bright. My window was bright orange, bathed in light. It's possible that someone was shining headlights in to my window but that's unlikely since I specifically park in the space that faces my window for that reason.

I went back to sleep - but when I woke up again an hour later, it was dark, very dark, as if the sun had never come up. I looked outside and it was extremely cloudy. One of those days when the clouds are so thick that it stays unnaturally dark. The weather has been very hot but in particular extremely humid the last few days - this morning, all the windows on the north side of my apartment were fogged with condensation.

I got in the shower, and was surprised as soon as I did so to hear really loud thunder. I'm not scared of thunderstorms like I once was, but even today I will not take a shower or use a landline telephone in a thunderstorm (believe me, you really don't want to do that) So I rushed my shower and got out. There was a huge thunderstorm brewing outside. Very odd for 8:00 am.

I went over to Enterprise to pick up my rental car. Today I was going to travel to Cincinnati, do a quick job, and then drive on to Lexington, Kentucky, where I would spend the night before doing another job in Kentucky (at a landfill east of Lexington) tomorrow. I got a Dodge Caliber. This is a topic for another time, but the Caliber is a car that I think is generally considered not very good, but I have to admit I absolutely love this car. Things I really like: it has a CVT, a hatchback, and aux audio input, although strangely, no cruise control.

Anyway, it rained this morning in Akron, and I mean torrential rain. Rain so hard that visibility was very low, like in snow or fog.

I was driving on Route 8 southbound in Akron. I had just passed the central interchange on my way to go west on Interstate 277. Route 8 in that section is three lanes in each direction. It was around 10:00 am and the traffic was heavy, but not jammed. The rain was coming down in what seemed like a waterfall. I was in the fast lane, but like everyone else was doing 50-55 miles per hour.

A car came up behind me relatively fast, enough to kind of catch my attention. It was raining hard enough and it was so dark (it looked like 10:00 pm at 10:00 am!) that I never actually figured out exactly what kind of car it was, but it had those bright halogen headlights, so my guess would be some sort of sports/luxury car. They slowed off though as they approached and didn't get too close, maybe 2-3 car distances behind me.

I was about to figure out how to move out of the way and get into the middle lane (I needed to get to the right eventually anyway), when I looked in my rear view mirror and was absolutely stunned by what I saw:

I have no idea what they did to cause what I was seeing, because it was already in progress when I started to look, but before my eyes I watched the car behind me slide a full 90 degrees to the right. I was looking, for a very brief instant, maybe 1-2 seconds, at the left profile view of the car behind me still moving towards me, when, I don't know, the tires must have reestablished grip, and all of a sudden it was shooting directly perpendicular to traffic at 45-50 miles per hour.

There was an SUV about 1 car length behind me in the middle lane, and the sliding car disappeared behind it. By that time I had moved far enough ahead that I could no longer see anything clearly behind me (it was POURING rain, I can't emphasize that enough), but I did realize that suddenly there were no cars behind me and the SUV anymore - whatever happened back there had choked off traffic.

I was really stunned... my jaw was just hanging open as I watched it happen in the rear view mirror. I still don't really understand how it happened. It felt like I was looking at a car crash in a movie or at a race, although I never actually saw anyone hit anything, for all I know the guy managed to right himself or something but there were a lot of cars around. Hopefully they all were keeping enough distance. It was really jarring, there are few things that will make you slow down and keep a lot of distance around cars quite like seeing something like that.

It stopped raining around Mansfield.

I stopped in Columbus and dropped off Harry Potter for my Mom, and then continued on my way. For some reason the guy behind the counter at the BP I stopped at tried to lock me down into a long conversation. All I did was ask him if the "BP Rewards" program was Columbus-only, and he said that for now it was just Columbus and Orlando, but that it would probably be expanding soon. He asked where I was from and I said the Cleveland area, and then he launched into a monologue about how he was going to be moving to Cleveland to go to school in Lakewood, but that was he scared because Cleveland was "a lot more ghetto than around here," blah blah, etc.

At this point it started to get freakishly hot outside. It was 95 by the time I got to Cincinnati. The job I had there was nice and simple, so no problems there.

There's a really interesting building going up currently in Covington that I didn't know about, the Ascent at Roebling's Bridge. It's got a very distinctive look, I think it will be an interesting addition to the Cincinnati skyline.

While driving the rest of the way to Lexington, I realized that here I was going to Lexington and that I hadn't even checked with Dave or Marcie to see about meeting up with them. But I also quickly realized I didn't have their telephone numbers... given the way today has been going though, it's probably for the best. So guys, if one of you reads this, I'm sorry, I can't believe I didn't think about it ahead of time.

I got to Lexington and checked in around 5:00 pm. The hotel seemed pretty nice but it was also kind of full. I went over to Arby's for dinner and was sitting in the drive-thru forever. I could not believe how much food the people in front of me ordered. It was three people in a minivan, but I sat there for 15 minutes! Every 2 minutes or so a hand would reach out from the window with another full bag of food. They must have decided to cater a party via the Arby's drive-thru window!

When I came back to the hotel, my arms full with an Arby's bag in one hand, my key card and drink in the other, I was very surprised to be greeted in the hallway by a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel. It was as if it had been just standing there waiting for me too, it walked the entire length of the hallway with me, looking up at me the whole time. Eventually I had to wedge myself into the door because it wanted to come into the room with me. I guess it must have been thinking Arby's or something.

I thought it was a little weird to be followed around a hotel by a lap dog. I'm guessing her name was Pebbles, because about 5 minutes later a lady with a good strong bluegrass accent was yelling "Pebbles? Pebbles!" in the hallway. Hopefully Pebbles found her way back to her room.

Check that: I hear her barking in the hallway right now.

I ate Arby's, and checked my e-mail, and suddenly realized that I felt really tired, fully acknowledged how strange today had been, and also realized that if I still had my wisdom teeth in I would have a massive headache (but didn't).

So I decided to take a short nap - an hour, and then get up again.

That was at 6:30 pm, but the nap went so well (or not so well, depending on your point of view), I just woke up about 15 minutes ago.

I had some weird dream where I was living in a hotel room in a very tall building in Rochester, New York, and was a private detective, solving crime for a local hockey team.

I am being 100% serious about that.

And that brings me up to now. I see that I have e-mail to read and there some interesting LiveJournal posts (Chris's in particular looks very interesting to me), but I think at this point I need to just cut my losses and go back to bed, and get this day over with as soon as possible.

current weather: Mostly Clear/Haze, 86, Wind: W 4; 86 degrees at 10:30 pm!

Tags: akron, cars, cincinnati, columbus, dogs, dreams, lexington, ohio, travel, weather, weird, work
Current Location: 38.019N 84.415W
Current Mood: confused
Current Music: none