“Clag” is what we used to call it in the squadron, and it is waiting for me,” I told Mac. The Admiral had ventured out to Willow in a holiday mood, and he was merry at the prospect of being safe in the local area with his family as Christmas collapsed on us.

“What does that mean?” he asked, taking a sip of Racer-5 lager beer.

“Low puffy clouds, crappy visibility. I don’t know where and how the term jumped over into the aviation world. It began as a descriptive phrase to describe the exhaust of steam locomotives, so if you saw puffy dark clouds hovering low near the ground, dense and dancing, that is jus what is floating out there on the heights of the Pennsylvania Turnpike,” I was having a minor problem in tilting my head back far enough to get a decent gulp of Happy Hour White. I waved at Liz-with-an-S to get a tumbler for the wine that would enable me to pour it down my gullet with more efficiency. “Not to mention the leaden gray skies of the freaking Ohio Turnpike.”

“The clag could render the way ahead a mystery,” said Mac. “How are you going to know what it looks like in the morning? There is some fierce weather out west.”

“The wonders of technology,” I said. The crowd was thin but enthusiastic. My pal Guy was in from the PacNorthwest, John-with and Jon-without were there, and the Director of a Major Suburban Intelligence Agency breezed through to hook up with her husband for a rare intimate night out together.

“Where is your security detail?” I asked. She laughed.

“I don’t need one, Vic,” she said with a smile. “And besides, times are not looking good for some of the nonsense that came along with the War on Terror. Merry Christmas to you all,” she said with a wave, and I walked her back to the dining room.

When I got back, Mac and I split an order of the Pollyface Farms Deviled eggs, I had another tumbler of wine, and we called it a night. He had a bounce in his step, and he looked great. I told Katya and Liz-S and Tinkerbell that I would miss them on the road, and hoped to be back to get properly mood-adjusted with them before the New Year, ins’hallah.

It was not a good night for sleeping. The ache from my neck woke me a couple times, and I wondered for the first time in my life if the drive was going to be too much.

I got levered out of bed with only modest agony and looked at the road ahead.

It is, I noted, not freezing, which is the only good thing about the weather ahead. I checked the traffic camera at Breezewood, the Village of Motels, and the roads appear wet but passible.

As you probably know, there is a monster storm brewing in New Mexico and Colorado, and my challenge is to make the Michigan line and head north before the blowing snow and gale winds and zero visibility clamp things down but good.

The road is no place to spend the holidays.

Trafficland is an invaluable resource for the harried traveler, and you can click into any VDOT camera hitched to the national network. http://trafficland.com/city/PIT/index.html

It is pretty amazing- if you find a camera that updates with decent frequency (Breezewood updates every two seconds) you can actually observe people in transit, assuming you have their GPS coordinates.

I guess that is a cautionary tale, from a privacy perspective, but it appears that particular train has left the station in a cloud of clag. We may as well get used to the fact that Big Brother has been here for a while. The interesting wrinkle is that it is not just Big Government that can follow us around. It is anyone with a little tech savvy.

Of course, I am looking at this from a snow-and-ice perspective, and so long as I can make decent time and the rubber side stays down and the shiny stays up, I will be content to let the constitutional issues play out on their own. I will be looking at the Trapster app on my smart phone to see if that asshole Ogemaw County Mountie is aggressively patrolling mile marker 210 on I-75 when I get close.

Rain in Toledo, too, but please, Jesus, make it just moist and not slippery.

I need to go collect the rental car, and the interesting times will begin. I slept like hell, and my neck is about immobile. That is actually useful, and will keep me looking ahead.

Straight ahead.

There is a lot of other clag to talk about- the impact of the transition in North Korea- could we see re-unification in our lifetimes? Could peace finally break out?

Could the Republicans extort the XL Pipeline out of the Senate in exchange for an extension of the payroll tax? Crap, I don’t care. I want to know if the basement is flooded in the Little Village by the Bay.

So, stuff neck and all, I am off into the clag. More if I get there in one piece.

Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra’
www.vicsocotra.com