travel

Thursday, all day long

This evening, I had these vague plans to go to a local bar with co-workers after work that fell through, either because the plans themselves fell through and nobody was going, or because I just wasn’t interested enough to inquire if the invite from last week was still operational. I hung around until five, finishing the review analysis I was hoping I would finish yesterday, but as I watched one co-worker after another say goodnight and say nothing of the bar, I decided I would probably just go home. I could have checked, since the place is right around the corner, but I really didn’t want to stay out all evening drinking. Two for one happy hour appeals to my wallet, but less to the part of me the drank too much at the office holiday party. I’m not worried about embarrassing myself, just physically feeling like I don’t want to do a lot of drinking. Particularly on a Thursday.

Do you know it was Thursday all day today? There ought to be a law.

So instead of a couple of drinks with co-workers, I went home. And let me tell you, the difference between New York mass transit at 4:30 and 5 o’clock is the difference between purgatory and hell.

I came home and had some scrambled eggs for dinner, did some writing — with some real momentum, if not necessarily word count — and played Portal. Did I mention that I downloaded Portal 1 and 2 again recently? The game’s easier the second time around, but it’s still enough of a challenge — and very funny — that it’s still a lot of fun to play.

So that was my Thursday. I’m sure some other things happened along the way, but those are the highlights, such as they are. “Such as they are” is about the closest I come to highlights, I’m afraid.

Still, tomorrow’s Friday, and then it’s a three-day weekend. Which is very nice.

The cake, though, is still a lie.

The week that was is no more

Poor little tree. It’s definitely faced the worst of it these past two weeks, losing first one bough early in the hurricane, then another in the snow. It’s only been planted there maybe a couple of years. Hopefully it will survive.

I look at that tree and think, well, I don’t have it so bad. Which is good, because commuting to work has been pretty dreadful all week. I have some small hope that, with a number of people off for Veteran’s Day, Monday will be a little lighter. At the very least, I’m quite glad I won’t have to face the Long Island Railroad for at least a couple of days.

I plan to spend the weekend doing nothing more exciting than reading Kaleidotrope submissions and getting a much-needed haircut. I might go see the new James Bond movie; I haven’t decided. But mostly just enjoying not being on a commuter train.

Train of thought

Oh, Monday.

I sometimes worry I’m being too hard on the Long Island Railroad when trains break down, or are delayed, or are over-crowded. These things happen, and maybe I’m just aggravated, just trying to get to work or back home without too much trouble. I mean, most days, the trains run on time, right?

I really have no idea. They didn’t today. I got up this morning at Jamaica to catch my connecting train, only to discover it was running 16 minutes late, and so effectively wasn’t my connecting train anymore. I hopped back on the original train, where of course I no longer had a seat, and rode in to Penn Station.

This evening, my train home was cancelled altogether, and I had to get a slightly later (and hot and overcrowded) train on which a bunch of cancelled trains were squeezed.

In between those, I think I may have done some work.

It’s Monday

Except for about ten or fifteen minutes this morning, when my subway train was stuck on the platform while someone in another car, apparently, received medical assistance, today was pretty much just an ordinary Monday. And to think, if I’d risked squeezing on to the over-crowded train that had pulled in five minutes earlier, I probably even had this much to report.

I spent the day mostly collating reviewer reports, contacting potential reviewers for other book projects, and combing the internet for syllabi and course listings and enrollments that might match the kind of instructors I have in mind.

And I did most of it while enjoying the audiobook of Stephen King’s It. It’s been years since I read the novel — which clocks in, across several audio files, at about 45 hours — but I had credits from Audible and wanted to revisit the book. So far, I’m really enjoying it, particularly actor Steven Weber’s reading. It’s not King’s most tightly plotted book by any means, but it’s maybe one of his best, and scariest, and it’s one that has some genuinely interesting things to say about childhood and fear. King reportedly wrote of the book later in a letter, “Never write anything bigger than your own head.” Which I’ve always liked to take both literally and figuratively, though perhaps also as advice not worth heeding.

A paid non-holiday

For some you, today was Columbus Day. For some, it was Thanksgiving. For me, it was pretty much just a regular Monday.

They upgraded me to Windows 7 at work, which is a weird coincidence given that I’d only just seen it for the first time this Saturday when my parents’ new computer arrived. I think I can give it a resounding “Ehh, I guess it’s okay.” I’m less annoyed by some the cosmetic changes than by the things, like my internet bookmarks, that were lost in the transition.

At least I got my Portal 2 password working again.

The trains home…well, not so much. More “signal problems” delayed my train about forty minutes. Considering that I pay a little over $250 a month for a monthly ticket, and these sorts of problems are happening quite often, with little indication that the Long Island Railroad is prepared to do anything but slap a Band-Aid on after the fact, it’s quite aggravating. At least the train was reasonably uncrowded this evening.

You know, with all the people for whom today was a holiday.