A quiet conversation with the air, a hellbent lost and found task, and not being a dog…

~Tuesday~  I was at the city bus stop at 8:16, where after ten minutes of just standing there, the back of my shirt was wet with sweat. Can you say humid as f*ck again? And zero breeze.

The bus arrived at 8:26, and not a moment too soon. I’ll give you a topic, “Neither Hot Mess Driver nor The Enforcer was at the helm of the bus this morning.” Discuss.

Linda Richman

Here’s my discussion about that: It just confirmed to me that the mobile oven of Hot Mess Driver was all her own doing and not some issue with the bus, because both The Enforcer and this different driver today had no problem keeping the bus cool.

I took a seat behind a man who had a Motorola Bluetooth device in his right ear, and at one point he had a—fairly quiet, I have to give him credit—conversation with the air around his face.

At another point, when the driver put on the brakes, something rolled from behind me and hit the back heel of my left shoe. When the bus started moving again, it rolled some more, and I heard the guy behind me say, “Oh, it’s back.”


My boss and I had our weekly staff meeting at 9:00, to which I brought her a pair of theater binoculars to take on her vacation to Las Vegas next week, where she’ll see one or two shows. We finished our meeting in about 30 minutes, instead of the scheduled 60, which is always a plus—for both of us.

Most of my work day was spent working on the July UITC meeting, including discussion and the final decision and announcement to cancel it, and on the July edition of OIT News, which is a monthly publication put out by my department.

Before leaving for the day, I sent an email to the person at gotriangle.org who thanked me a month ago for reporting that erroneous sign that I b*itched about again yesterday in my blog. In today’s email, I noted that it still isn’t fixed, and then pointed her to my yesterday’s blog entry in which I talk about the poor shelter design. I have little-to-no hope of it making any difference at all, but I’d rather at least try than just to b*tch about it.


Waiting to go home at the city bus stop on Hillsborough Street—where in spite of the weather app on my CrackBerry saying it was 97° but felt like 104, it actually felt like about 110 under the bus shelter—a woman approached me and asked me what I thought she should do with a pair of eyeglasses she found on the ground under one of the seats there in the shelter.

I told her that I would give them to the bus driver of whatever bus she was getting on (as the Wolfline (university), the CAT (city), and the TTA (regional) buses all stop at that stop) and let them use whatever lost and found process they have. In my dream, each system would have its own lost and found department, but would report whatever they received in it up to gotriangle.org, which seems to be the “umbrella organization” over all Triangle-area bus systems. I like dreaming, ’cause dreaming can make you experience good customer service.

She not only wanted to get those glasses to a lost and found department, but she was hellbent on leaving a note there—somewhere in the shelter—to let whoever might come looking for them there what she had done with them. “Do you have any tape?” she asked me.

I told her that I didn’t, but that I had a piece of paper if she wanted that, which she excitedly took. I thought that there still might be enough goo on my credit card to scrape off and stick to the paper, but I didn’t dare get into all that.

I was glad to board the bus to be done with the woman and to enjoy the cool air. I was not glad to board the bus for this reason:

Okay, there is an ear piercingly loud, high-pitched, and continuous noise on the #12 outbound bus. #NoOneElseIsActingLikeTheyHearIt #NoIDontTHINKImADog


I was supposed to go to the gym and then meet Joe at Caribou Coffee at 8:00. I ate dinner—those two slices of pizza from the gym yesterday—and then procrastinated so long that there wasn’t time to get to the gym and be at Caribou by 8:00.

At 7:30, Joe called to say that there were issues going on back home with his mom, and that he’d have to call me back to let me know if our Caribou plans were going to work.

Long story short, it didn’t work, so I took advantage of the opportunity to go to the gym, where I skipped ab work, since I’d just done that yesterday, and I did 45 minutes of cardio on the elliptical machine. I was pretty pleased with myself after that.


Back home, I moved the load of laundry to the dryer that I’d put in the wash before going to the gym (being sure to be grateful that nothing went wrong to flood the kitchen while I was gone), I chatted with Robert, checked in with Joe (things seem to have calmed down with his mom, although they are still tenuous at best), and read a few articles online, including:

  1. Google+ offers chance for a social reboot
  2. 9 things you shouldn’t say to your child
  3. Michael Irvin is on the cover of Out magazine

I actually got to bed at a decent hour, which means it was before midnight.

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