This was a first on the bus this morning: A guy using a cane—the metal kind with a rubber top on it for a handle and four forked prongs at the base for stability—boarded the bus and at the entrance by the ticket machine he faced the entire bus and said, “Does anyone have 50 cents to help me make the fare?” (The fare is $1.00.)
At first, no one responded, and as I was reaching into my pocket to see if I had two quarters in my change purse, he started looking at each person separately, and said, “No one? I need 50 cents to help me get downtown to my doctor’s appointment this morning.”
Before I could pull out the quarter, two dimes and a nickel I was getting out of my change purse to give him, a lady in the second row gave him what he needed.
A picture of me is featured in this article: 10 Things That May Surprise You at a Tweetup. Cool.
Helios does not have my badge. 🙁 I understand now that I have to pay either $20 or $25 to have it replaced. That sucks. I’m going to look a little longer.
| Violinist Joshua Bell played incognito in a Washington subway No one knew this, but the violinist was Joshua Bell, one of the best musicians in the world. He played one of the most most intricate pieces ever written with a violin worth 3.5 million dollars. In the 45 minutes the musician played, only 6 people stopped and stayed for a while. About 20 gave him money but continued to walk their normal pace. He collected $32. When he finished playing and silence took over, no one noticed it. No one applauded, nor was there any recognition. Two days before his playing in the subway, Joshua Bell sold out at a theater in Boston and the seats averaged $100. Read the entire, true story here on snopes.com. |
I had a very enjoyable lunch today, in spite of the persistent light drizzle. I caught one of the Wolfline buses and got off at the Meredith College stop. I walked back toward campus for about three blocks, where I had lunch at Burger King with a coupon.
After that, I walked about 6-8 blocks back toward campus, where I passed three city bus stops (on my regular 12 Method Road route), and then stopped at a joint city bus and Wolfline stop. The city bus came first, so I hopped on it for the 4-6 more blocks back to my stop on campus.
It was a very enjoyable combination of free transportation, a discounted lunch, and some exercise.
A friend and colleague of mine, Jen, went to Times Square for New Year’s Eve. I stopped over by her office to ask her how it was just as she was about to tell the story to her brother, who also works in our area, as an intern.
It was a wild, wild story and I’m not going to repeat it here as she mentioned possibly blogging it. If/when she does, I’ll link to it for sure. She went up there with a group of about eight, they drove, and here are a few of them looking like they couldn’t possibly have any more fun.
On the ride home, there was this lady on the bus who was in one of my classes in grad school. At first I was remembering her as being in my Variety in Language (linguistics) class, but the more I watched (and heard) her and her husband talk, it dawned on me that she was in my Analysis of Verbal Data class.
She’s a physics teacher, and her data analysis project was all about the Right Hand Rule (first I’d heard of it) and other methods for solving physics problems—looking specifically at which method, if any, was more effective for students.
She really took to the math in that class, and it struck me because “they” are always saying that “girls” don’t excel in math. And in this conversation with her husband, he was talking about what sounded like a spreadsheet, describing what the numbers were in the columns and the mathematics he was performing on them, and she seemed to be following it all in her head.
I thought about them having sex and how it might be hot in a geeky kind of way. But I digress…
At home, I did another quick comb through the house and my car looking for my badge—to no avail.
Then, off to the gym, where I had a decent workout tonight, consisting of a bunch of lower back and lower abdomen stretching and strengthening exercises, and 12 sets of 25 reps for a total of 300 ab crunches on the ab bench. The place was jammed packed with new resolutions, which thankfully included a number of hot men.
I read a couple of references, on two different LiveJournal friends’ pages, to “whatever happens between Facebook and Livejournal,” which made me go back up my journal entries.
The last time I’d backed it up was in April of 2007, so I backed up all of my entries since April 1, 2007.
We got an e-mail from Mary today trying to schedule a January meeting of The Mostly Social Book Club, so I spent some time reading Lost on Planet China tonight, since it’s my book selection, and we’re going to discuss it at that meeting.