jennanddave.com

The town we live in prides itself on being pedestrian friendly, which I'll concede it is, but only as long as you don't want to do anything as wantonly crazy as cross the street. Once you want to do that, you're in trouble. I've been almost hit by cars while crossing the street within the supposedly safe confines of a crosswalk more times in the almost four years we've lived here than in the twenty years I lived in Boston. This particular characteristic of the town used to irritate me to no end. Now it's just a fact of life, as is the panic-stricken/defensive look most people get when they come to the end of a sidewalk.

One of the ways the town attempts to achieve pedestrian friendliness is with an abundant use of the four-way stop sign. Every intersection in the residential areas surrounding downtown's main street has a four-way stop. (Off the top of my head I can only think of one intersection that's a two-way stop.) This means every time you come to the end of a block, you have a stop sign. Most people just slow down a little bit, whip their heads around in every direction, then step on the gas until they get to the next intersection, where they repeat the whole process. Woe be the day you get more than one car at a four-way stop. Sometimes people navigate them the way you're supposed to (first car to stop at the intersection has the right-of-way), but more often the drivers look at each other and wait for the other person to go ahead and do something already. All of this happens over the course of a few seconds, but always I end up banging my head on the steering wheel while yelling the "Rules of Stop Sign Engagement", memorized verbatim from the PA Drivers Manual at the top of my lungs. It isn't as pretty as it sounds.

While we were in Charlottesville something earth-shattering happened around here: a Super Wal-mart opened. Now we can indulge in the convenience of grocery shopping and buying junk all in one giant, soul-sucking store. On Saturday the first thing we did after breakfast was jump in the car and drive over as fast as we thought we could without risking getting pulled over. There were long lines of traffic trying to get into and out of the parking lot. We couldn't figure out what the problem was until we got closer to the store. The traffic flow is regulated with four-way stop signs, followed by tons of stop signs in the parking lot itself. It was a total disaster. Part of the problem was it was the first Saturday after the grand-opening so everybody was there that day. I'm sure that once the excitment dies down it'll be more manageable. On the other hand, Henry and I went grocery shopping there this morning to see what it was like and it was still kind of a nightmare. We ended up parking really far back and away from the main entrance to the parking lot so that we wouldn't have to contend with as many drivers.

The whole point of this post is to get Dave in such a huff over the state of traffic in Small Town Pennsylvania that he won't be quite so annoyed when he comes home to find this on his dining room table:

What should we name him? How about "Reason Number One Why Jenn Shouldn't Food Shop at the Super Walmart"? It's kind of a mouthful. Maybe we should go with something like "Bo".