An old light blue 1995 Toyota Corolla

Over twenty years ago, tired of all the beaters I’d driven for years, I bought a two-year-old Toyota Corolla with 45,000 miles on it for about ten grand.  

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Changing Time

Time has morphed since I left the court. Perhaps metamorphosed? Or as Calvin (of Hobbes) had it:  transmogrified? When I was still working, there was a need to get done what I could when I could with the free time I had. I was often focused on time efficiency, and all too often at a certain point had to leave some aspect undone until later. Now there is the concept of plenty of time, which inflates the expectation of how much I can get done.

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Really, why did the infamous “they” fix what wasn’t broken?

I just sent this email to my coworker, who wants to go get coffee this morning:

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Just Another BART Altercation

Last night I saw this large, balding guy follow a short man onto the BART train, hollering at him. When the short fellow tried to laugh it off, the balding guy got right in his face, aggressively laughing back, mocking him as his head bobbed up and down. 

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The New Bay Bridge

Twenty-four years after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, we finally got a new bridge to replace the damaged eastern span of the San Francisco Bay Bridge. It’s pretty, despite SF Chronicle architecture critic John King’s dismissal.

Here’s the new span next to the old span.

 

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The War for Couth Continues

So I mentioned the ferret-faced woman in my last post, and how a month or so went by until I saw her again.

When I got on at Civic Center this time, someone was in the window seat next to the chair I usually go for, so I sat an aisle back. The train got crowded quickly after that, and I noticed an elderly couple  looking for seats together; they might have been Indian immigrants. They hesitated by that open aisle seat before passing me by. Just then I saw ferret-face get on the train, looking for her best opportunity.

Behind me I heard a woman offer a seat to someone, and then an Indian-accented voice politely decline. Ferret-face passed me by, then began demanding someone move.

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Further Setbacks in the War for Couth

I’ve stopped using BART regularly for my morning commute. Whether or not our so-called economic recovery has been jobless, my anecdotal experience is that the BART trains are now regularly packed with commuters headed somewhere, so much so that when I went in early one morning last week, on the train at 6:15 a.m., it was already standing room only into the City. SRO? At 6:15?

My feet, knees, and ankles are no longer what they were when I ran cross country all those years ago,  and years of standing on buses and trains have taken their toll. I need to sit. So I’ve been doing the casual carpool thing. Most often it’s quiet and uneventful, but every so often there’s a livewire.

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When the TransBay Tube Closes, Everybody Gets Squeezed

First we heard the helicopters, right before dawn. We guessed it might be the Occupy protests over in  downtown Oakland again. When the missus went outside she came back in and reported she could see helicopters in the early morning light over the port of Oakland.  Then we heard the news about the fire.

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Rockin’ Robin, tweet, tweet, tweet!

It started with my friend a couple weeks ago. We walk our dogs together weekend mornings, and he asked if I’d noticed all the birds singing to greet the dawn.

 I hadn’t. 

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Tsunami telephone

The phone rang at 3 a.m.

My instinct is not to answer, which is ultimately pointless, as I’ll just lay awake until I get up in annoyance to go check the machine and see who the hell it was.

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