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Fri.Jun.30.2006

4:53 pm EDT        90°F (32°C) in Newnan, GA

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Yes sir, it is a hot one down here. At the moment, I’m parked along Interstate 85 roughly halfway between the Alabama state line and downtown Atlanta; I have a delivery just across the line in Opelika, AL, in a few hours, and then in all likelihood a final delivery about 90 miles (145 km) from there in southeastern Alabama on Sunday night.

Just in case anybody who reads this (a) saw Baldwinsville, NY as the location of my last update, (b) heard about all the flooding in the mid-Atlantic and Northeast, and (c) was worried about me, I got out of there about a day before everything started to go all to hell. I picked up my current load Monday night in Frankfort, NY (near Utica), in the midst of one hell of a thunderstorm; thankfully, most of the rest of Monday night wasn’t too bad after I left there. I got as far as Scranton, PA, that night, and started out from there Tuesday afternoon; it was probably no more than about 50 miles (80 km) south of Scranton, up in the Schuylkill Highlands of east-central Pennsylvania along Interstate 81, that it began to rain … and rain … and rain … I swear it just would not stop. In fact, it wasn’t just raining; in most places, it was really fucking coming down.

The worst of the rain seemed to end around Harrisonburg, VA, but it was still at least drizzling most of the way down to Roanoke as I put more of I-81 behind me. It was actually more like Wednesday morning that places in the Northeast really started to have flooding issues; the eastern I-88 corridor, between Binghamton and Albany, NY, seemed to be hardest hit. In fact, roads in the Empire State were completely borked up by all of this; a 20-foot (6 m) section of I-88 southwest of Oneonta was washed away when a culvert beneath the pavement collapsed, killing two truck drivers, and a 125-mile (200 km) section of the New York State Thruway between Syracuse and Schenectady was closed as well. (Portions of this part of the Thruway sit literally right next to the Mohawk River, and even a three-foot (1 m) rise in the Mohawk would inundate the Thruway in many places.)

I really don’t have much to say about yesterday’s Supreme Court smack-down of Der Führer King Chimpy’s illegal kangaroo courts for detainees at Guantánamo, except that it is a heartening development — even if only for a short time, as the Rubber-Stamp Rethuglicans will no doubt scramble to cover his ass in some way. As usual, I will otherwise defer to the excellent analysis provided on such sites as DailyKos.

Oh well, paperwork, food, and my upcoming delivery all beckon, so that’s it for today.