You're making lists today of all the things you haven't done yet

[j4]

Today I have:

• Learned a lot about Dreamweaver
• Sent a glass bottle-stopper, a plastic giraffe and a plastic dragon to various people in the University
• Tried a Lee's Original Macaroon Bar, and arranged a delivery of some more of these ambrosial foodstuffs and some tablet as well!
• Sent at least two emails I probably shouldn't have sent
• Failed to send at least two emails I really should send
• Read the first two stories in The Saint to the Rescue
• Deliberately driven through a red light (after waiting for over 5 minutes on a nearly-empty junction, and the people in the other lane gave up first, and I was still careful, but it still feels like a Bad Thing)
• Sung lots of random stuff, from If ye love me to Goodnight, Sweetheart
• Agreed to read a young boy a bedtime story next week
• Managed, on the whole, to convince myself that the nervous crampy feeling in my stomach that won't go away really is just period pains, and not a sign of Worrying about anything in particular
• Failed to find a cure for period pains, but enjoyed a glass of kirsch as part of the experimental process
• Eaten prawns
• Had 50p eaten by a snack-machine on the New Museum Site

The red light was strange. I was sitting there at the light listening to Everything But The Girl, and thinking how sitting there at a red light that never changed, just waiting, looking up at the light expectantly, trying to maintain that sense of being about to move, would make a really good music video for "Mirrorball" (which had just started as I reached the lights); and I was sort of subconsciously assuming that the lights would change halfway through the song so that I wouldn't be able to concentrate on the lyrics any more, and they didn't, and I can't decide whether it would have been better from a music-video point of view if the lights had changed and I had slowly driven away, receding into the darkness.

Come on girl, it's too late.
Come on girl, it's too late now.
Come on girl, let it all go.
Come on girl, it's too late now.
Come on girl, it's gonna be alright.
Come on girl, it's never gonna be alright.
It's too late now.
Let it all go...
Cause it's never gonna be alright.

Comments

[lusercop.livejournal.com]

I assume you were in a car at the red light, in which case, the thing to do if you can, is to reverse about 10-20m and drive up to it again. Occasionally they get confused (because they think there are no cars above the loops in the road). On a bike, they often don't register because there's not enough metal to create a sufficient magnetic distortion.

[oldbloke.livejournal.com]

Smartlights: good when they work.
We have an exit barrier on our carpark with a sensor, and every day somebody gets too close to the car in front and doesn't register as a seaprate vehicle, so the barrier drops just before they reach it and won't go up again.
And they sit there, until somebody goes over and explains they'll need to back up a bit and try again. It gets quite tedious, at times.

[j4.livejournal.com]

I assume you were in a car at the red light

Yeah, hence the word "driven"...

reverse about 10-20m

I'd have had to reverse through the queue of cars behind me!

And is it really safer to reverse in the dark up a main road with plenty of turnings off/onto it (which is probably illegal too, and certainly not something that anybody would expect a driver to do under any normal circumstances) than to carefully take a left turn through a red light on an empty junction?

Okay, you can call me an 3v1l c4g0r now.

[k425.livejournal.com]

If there were other cars behind you, the sensor should have registered them and turned green. It didn't.

In your shoes/driving seat I'd've decided that the lights were broken and driven through. Carefully and feeling as though doing A Bad Thing.