Unless I'm missing something, we're not getting the flying cars. Or the pneumatic tubes. Instead, familiar technology will probably carry me to and from work and play. I expect it'll carry me on my last ride.

The only upside to stewing in traffic at one of our local tunnels is that it gives a guy time to think. To think about why Hampton Roads and Richmond have failed utterly to deal with a transportation system so precarious that one flat tire can make several thousand people late for work.

Editor's note: Beginning Monday, June 15, 2009, editorial writers' columns will appear only in The Virginian-Pilot newspaper. Read more about this decision.  

Chances are pretty good that you and I are both heavier than we should be. So are 32 percent of our kids. Extra weight puts us and them at increased risk for heart disease and stroke and diabetes and cancer. To make it even worse, a new study by the American Academy of Pediatrics' Committee on Environmental Health lays the problem squarely on our doorsteps and in our garages.

The coffee maker was asking for it. Not literally, of course. But when it started leaking a miasma of grounds and half-brewed java all over the counter before 7 a.m., it had to know its days were numbered: in minutes, or - as it turned out - seconds.

Sitting across from him, it's hard to shake the impression that Bob McDonnell may well be the state's next governor. Perhaps it's the familiarity: At one time or another a neighbor to almost every Virginian - and a former prosecutor, delegate and attorney general - the 54-year-old McDonnell has been around forever.

Ordinarily, when people leave me messages asking when I plan to remove my head from a certain part of my anatomy, I assume they don't actually want an answer. But it was a weekend, and I was bushed. I blame fatigue for the fact that I found his number in our Caller ID system - he'd somehow forgotten to leave it, along with his name - and I called him back.

The house on Jersey Street was roughly the same distance from the Atlantic and the Delaware Bay, an uninsulated A-frame that could sleep a dozen kids in twin barracks where the attic ought to be.

Among the three men running for the Democratic nomination for governor, state Sen. Creigh Deeds seems to be the one who fits most naturally into the moderate mold shaped by Mark Warner and Tim Kaine. He's also the one who seems least likely to succeed them. That's the conventional wisdom, at least, and there are only a couple of months left to change it before the June primary.

At the end of January, John Updike's unstoppable voice finally stopped. It was the end of a profoundly old-fashioned kind of American literary life, of a man unashamed of a passion for letters and writers. It was the end of the kind of life I'd wanted, once upon a time.