11/21/05

We had a nice weekend with not much going on. It's good to have those every now and then. Actually got to sleep in on Saturday since there was no choir practice in the morning. We don't usually sing with the church choir throughout the year, but we do for the Christmas concert. We've been having practices for a couple Saturdays from 10-12. That turns out to be fairly fine, since Aria is usually in her best mood in the late mornings. She's also more prone to nap then (no pun intended).

I'm looking forward to the upcoming holidays. It's such a nice change from the normal routine. We've had a lot going on at work lately. It's crunch time for a few projects. In addition, our annual research meeting is in January, so I put several days into editing and resubmitting several papers that were accepted. Last year I had one paper accepted for presentation and publication, which was my thesis work on "Operational and Safety Effects of U-Turns at Signalized Intersections". Sounds riveting, I know. But if I may link it to the real world for you, it has to do with designing (or retrofitting) a road from having a middle two-way-left-turn-lane to having a median. This would eliminate direct left turns from businesses along the roadway and drivers would have to execute more U-turns at the adjacent intersections. My project was to figure out what effect this would have on the intersection operations (how much would it slow things down) and safety (would it increase crash risk). The reason for putting in a median is primarily a safety one. Direct left turns are a fairly substantial safety risk. So there's your traffic engineering lesson for the week. Maybe I'll teach you about vehicle detector loops next time.

Final note. If you were to order a pizza with one half pepperoni and one half black olives, how would you expect those toppings to be arranged on the pizza? Well, the Garrett Road Papa John's apparently believed that I might want both toppings crowded onto one half, leaving the other half plain.... Sigh. Waited for 10 mins for them to do a new one. At least I talked them into stamping my carry-out card three times. Only two more times till a free large pizza. Oh yeah.