thebaldgeek

I have noticed a trend……. twice now when dropping Amy off at school I have been nearly hit head on in the car park. More than 4-5 times I have been nearly sideswiped.
In each case, its been a 16-17 year old kid at the wheel, girls feature more than boys in my near misses.
It seems to me that these kids might have a lack of experience in handling low speed corners. Every near miss has been at a corner. In a nut shell they have been cutting the corner. Its not like they did not see me, each time they did, its just they do not have any spatial awareness. They have no idea how much space their car takes up, or how it moves though space (ie the car park).
I think its an interesting idea to have kids drive a year or two before they are old enough to (legally) drink. But is 16 too young to be behind the wheel of a car?

Im feeling much better and we are off to LA for church tomorrow. Just an up and back, I have some photos to take on Sunday……..

The burning question is, was Gary or I gripping the wheel the tightest?

I was pretty good when I had breakfast, lunch was meh (local restaurant with this weeks training group), by three oclock, I knew I could not stay at work.
I barley made it up the stairs and into our bathroom before I was on my knees gripping the big porcelain steering wheel with both hands…… Man O man I was crook. I lay on the bed for about an hour and then was at it again, lay down for about 1/2 hour and then was at it again. By this time I was pretty much dry reaching. There was not a lot left in the tank.
We wont go there, but the other end was leaking pretty bad too.

Is 9pm and I am a little better, I have had a little toast with Vegemite on it. Im really sore from spewing my guts out, feeling very, very dehydrated, but least I am not sailing though any stop signs! Have not been to the dunny for a few hours, so I dont know whats happening with the plumbing, but hopefully it’s on the mend (I dont intend on doing any test breaking of the wind to find out!)

Anyway, there you have it, probably a huge over share, but I just had to share my first real bought of sickness in America with you all.
Normal blog programming should resume in a day or so (Oh, I really hope so, it was / is NO fun!)

Drove into a different part of the country last night to look at a few things (just needed to get out of the apartment for a while as much as anything)….. I’m sure I have mentioned this in one of my traffic blogs, but the whole 4 way stop thing got hammed yesterday.
The town we needed up in, Hemet, seems to be the capital of 4 way stops, one after the other for miles on end. Stop start, stop start, stop start, it was so frustrating. No wonder you end up doing whats called a ‘Californian stop’, its where the front of the car just dips down, but you dont actually stop. Its totally illegal. Thats whats called a moving violation. Its one of the worst fines you can get, it counts on your driving record and will affect your insurance premium. Every one takes such a huge risk doing it. I have been really trying hard to come to a full stop, but yesterday it was really getting ridiculous!
To top it off the whole silly thing of first there is the first to go, I mean what is that about?!?! You get the case where you have two cars rushing up to a stop sign to be the first not to ‘stop’ and thus the first to demand their right of way through it!
I would love to have seen (not been in, just next to) Gary driving his bus down this road yesterday, so many stops and starts with at least 3 gear changes between stops. Man, it would have been carnage!

So, Im sure I have done a hopeless job describing it all….. lets have one last go…… Its a 4 way cross road, you approach it, watching what the other 3 cars are doing. If you stop first, you get to go first, no matter what the others are doing, turning or going straight, if you are the 3rd car to pull up (behind 2 others), you get to go 3ed in line. If you are 3-4 cars back, you need to keep an eye on the other 3 cars as well, and first to pull up after the ones in front is next to go. Its really crazy, its really slow, its really frustrating.
It totally fails to be blog fodder, but I had to vent …….. (And I had to relate how amusing it was for me to picture Garys bus just cruising through them all in 5th gear!)

It’s a big deal over here and effects all sorts of weird things. They run on this system of 3 digit credit rating score. Ours is the worst at 000, good is 700 perfect is around 730. Until we get ours up to the +550 mark, we are fighting hard with most money matters. (Buying a mobile phone for example). We have just applied for a secured credit card. They have taken 1000 bucks of our money, locked it away and given us a credit card with a  1000 dollar limit. We have to be careful to  not pay it off, if you pay it all off when its due, then you never have any money out on loan, so they cant judge if you can be lent money, because you never actually borrow any money. So we are going to put about 400 bucks on it, and then just make the minimum payments for about 3 months. Then pay it off and put a different amount on it, then make those minimum payments for about another 3 months. In 6 months we should be a lot better off with a reasonable score. This is the only way we can build a score. Paying your electricity and gas does not count. In 6 months we should be able to move to an unsecured card and get our 1000 bucks back. Crazy to us, but normal to every one here. Parents do all sorts of weird things to help their teenagers build a credit score before they go off to uni and move out of home and things (other wise they cant rent or buy a car).
Just another of the joys of arriving mid life into a country with very different systems  than the one you grew up in……