Just one little thing..........

I'm very proud of myself this year for being so zen about Christmas. I just refused to get sucked into the craziness. I started early, shopped online, wrapped as I went along, saved all year so I wouldn't have credit card bills. But there's one thing I can't do anything about. Traffic. I did what I could to diminish my involvement in it. 1) The aforementioned shopping online 2) Using backroads as much as possible 3) Walking when possible 4) Shopping at odd hours ie. early in the morning. Unfortunately, I can't avoid the traffic altogether, because A) I live right across from a mall with Christmas Tree Shop and Kohl's in it, and 2) I live one set of lights from the MALL - not the little mall - the BIG MALL. So tonight, the Tuesday night before Christmas, it took me 20 minutes to go the 1.8 miles from my office to my home. My office is on one side of Route 28 (aka "The Strip") and my home is on the other. So there's no way to go from one place to the other without making a left-hand turn. Can't make a left turn out of the office to try and take a back way.....I'd have to cross four lanes of traffic and would therefore be sitting there all night. Can't make a left turn at Kelly Road, which would lead me to a back road, because everyone else who wants to take that left gets into the middle lane reserved for people trying to get across the lanes at least a 1/2 mile ahead of time, crossing double yellow lines in the process. By the time I could LEGALLY get in the left turn lane, there were already dozens of cars in the lane behind me. (At this point, I should have been an a**hole and put my left blinker on and cut into that line, but then I would have been screwing the people behind me waiting to go straight, and I'm just not like that.) Finally, my last chance to take a left onto my street (which is also the left needed to go to Christmas Tree Shop) and I had to sit through FOUR turns of the light (each turn being the people going straight, and then the turn lane, then the other people going straight, and their turn lane, etc) before I could get through. Here I come upon the most frustrating part of the trip. I need to take a left into my driveway, and the people coming out of the mall block the intersection! Their light is red, but that doesn't stop them from pulling up as close as they can to the car in front of them so they can sit there and wait. This is where I really do become an a**hole, because I lay on the horn, knowing darn well they can't go anywhere and they have to sit there and listen to my horn and view my fury. THAT'LL teach them!