Reduce pee

When you drive about 4,000 miles each month, 1,000 miles per week, and spend well over three hours in your car every day, you get bored. Really bored. You also quickly become really creative in alleviating that boredom. You not only know the frequency for every single NPR station between your house and your office, you have the programming memorized too ("Ooh, I'm in time to catch 'On the media!'"). You have an iPod full of songs, a list of friends and family on speed dial, and you have no qualms about practicing for Sunday's worship team by singing into you iPhone's voice memo app and then critically reviewing your performance. Out loud.

But at the end of the day, it is just you in your car. By yourself. Surrounded by lots of semis and drivers from Florida who obviously got their licenses from a box of Crackerjacks. And some days are good, and some are not so good.

If there is one thing that rains on my commuting parade, it's road construction. I have a thing with road construction ever since we lived in Germany, and the 61 (one of the major interstates in our neck of the woods) was under construction the entire time we were there. We'retalking years people, years. It wasn't a few miles of construction either, oh no, it went on and on and on, past Konlenz, Cologne, and God only knows where it ended. If it ever did. As someone who used on the 61 on a regular basis, it was close to traumatizing. Seriously. Imagine a three-lane interstate reduced to two tiny lanes, walls on either side, semis and vehicles with seriously poorly balanced RVs trailing behind them rumbling by, the speed limit set to 60km/h (a whopping 35 mph), and German speed cameras lurking everywhere. As my southern friends would say: It was a mess.

So moving to Georgia was a relief. No road construction, no ridiculous speed limits, and speed cameras are, at least in all the counties I drive through, illegal. Life was good.

And then last year, GDoT decided that things had been quiet long enough, and it was high time to repave a large section of the interstate. Having, at that point, become a veritable expert at hydroplaning and driving without any sort of visibility thanks to all the spray engulfing my apparently ridiculously small vehicle, I couldn't agree more. Bring on the Dutch 'super open asphalt'! But for a reason I have yet to understand, the Georgia Department of Transportation decided to start with 27 miles. Not three, not five, no, 27. Oh wait, they haven't actually repaved more than six miles since they started last summer. Oh no. But they did reduce 27 miles of interstate (and yes, it is 27 miles, I counted. Several times) to two teeny tiny lanes with a wall on one side and a vey soft shoulder on the other. Add the sixteen wheelers and the inattentive Florida drivers in the mix, and you can imagine I have witnessed some pretty devastating accidents in the past year. Thanks to the ensuing roadblocks, I have also finally been able to tour all the small towns whose names I used to only know from the signposts I would fly by. And although there are no speed cameras, I swear that the main reason Georgia's revenue has gone up this year is thanks to the State Patrol troopers who are on that road like crows on roadkill. I suppose I should be grateful that at least the speed limit is a fairly decent 60mph.

Anyway, to say I'm done with the construction is an understatement. It's hard to focus on Steve Innskeep, that high C I need to hit, or finding the right playlist when you're trying to not get squashed into the wall by a semi flying by, or hit that uneven ledge where the pavement meets the old shoulder (which is now roadway) which will most definitely send your car (or at least my travel-size one) flying, probably into the muddy shoulder. There's a speed limit to maintain, lane shifts to pay attention to, and more importantly, other drivers, who might not have noticed that lane shift, to look out for.

So every morning and evening when I see the orange cones, the large signs indicating an upcoming construction zone, and the overhead jumbotron signs warning you to ahift right and reduce your speed, I sigh. Except this morning. I'm not sure if the sign was broken, or if a joker had gotten a hold of the remote control, but instead of its usual "Reduced speed ahead!", the sign read: "Reduce pee ahead!"

And I giggled. And life was good.