Where does the time go? Here we are moving into the final month of the first half of 2009, or if you’re a state government employee—into the final month of the fiscal year.
The most fantastic buscapade took place today:
I took a seat toward the front of the bus for less than thirty seconds, and then moved behind a lady—I’m guessing a college student—who had her laptop open and was actually typing on it. You know I positioned myself to enable some screen visibility over her shoulder. Imagine my surprise when I saw LiveJournal up in her browser and her typing into a “Input new blog entry” screen. Oh goody.
I held up my 817-page Anna Karenina tome in such a way that it looked like I was reading it, but I was clandestinely reading above it, and I lagged behind her writing starting from the beginning of the entry…
He’s an older man. Got on three stops after I did. Could be a student, but if he is, a grad student. Black t-shirt. Khaki shorts. Or he could be a professor.
Black t-shirt? Khaki shorts? Hmmm.
I noticed him before he got on, over at his stop as the bus pulled up to the intersection before turning onto the road where he was waiting. As soon as he saw the bus, he bent over and grabbed the black laptop bag strap and placed it over his shoulder. He picked up another black bag, which looked like a briefcase, only a fabric-type one, not a hard one. He also had a grocery bag with him, and hard as I tried, I couldn’t make out what was in it, although it looked like food. That’s a lot of bags, and a lot of black. Kind of a geek, too.
“Oh my god. It is me she’s writing about!” I thought, heart rate jumping.
At the entrance to the bus, his geekiness was confirmed by a badge hanging from around his neck, which he flashed at the driver—in lieu of payment, it seemed. He took a seat in the front, but only long enough to pull the material of his shirt away from his stomach, like a lot of heavier people do—seemingly subconsciously. He’s on the very edge of stocky, totally on the verge of chubby. At least he’s wearing black. That helps. Wait. He’s moving.
I don’t know if it occurred to her at this moment that I might have taken the seat behind her, but she abruptly shut her laptop, so abruptly in fact that the noise it made as it slammed shut snapped me out of my daydream about how I might appear in someone else’s buscapades.
I only had one work meeting today, but I spent most of the morning preparing for it, as I realized that there was one Web page I was supposed to have created before that meeting that had “slipped through the cracks.”
The meeting went fine after initially being miffed that a group of people were in the conference room that I’d reserved. What was irritating was that when I mentioned that I had the room, one of them said, “All I know is that this is the room that’s on my calendar.”
I resisted totally lowering myself to their level by ripping open my laptop and saying, “Well this is the room that’s on my calendar, too!” The smaller conference room next door was open, and there were only two of us in my meeting, so I just moved us there.
The inconvenient and mundane construction work on Hillsborough Street continues, but a creative vandal decided to spice it up a little with some “barrel art” [Click the image to read the blog entry in which the “artist” talks about his “art”]:
I picked up the “8 Pepperoni Roll Special” from Gumby’s and drove over to Joe’s to have dinner with him and to catch up on his overnight venture to the beach. He’d finally gotten his laptop back, fixed from Dell, and I showed him the Ellen video, which is just an absolute hoot if you haven’t seen it:
Back home, I read some more of Anna Karenina, which I’m just loving.