No-televersary, buscapades, insurancecapades, and St. Paddy’s @ Trailer Park Prize Night…

~Thursday~ 

I got rid of all my televisions nine years ago today


I was at the city bus stop at 8:18, and when 8:22 came and went, I thought I might have missed this one, but it eventually came at 8:27.

In the meantime, Exercising Asian Man ran (literally) up to the stop, precariously rested his book bag on top of a telephone company indicator pole:


and took off down the street jogging while pounding on his back. Eventually he stopped, did some squat type things while throwing his arms forward and up in the air.

He jogged back toward the stop when he saw the bus coming down Kent, and as the bus was pulling up, an Asian lady holding a baby ran towards the stop from the opposite direction. When she got within hearing distance, which was just in time for us to board the bus, she waved the baby’s little arm and said, “Say bye-bye to papa.”

A lady sat in the front center-facing set of four connected seats, taking up all four of them with her things, one of which was a huge black trash bag full of—presumably by its shape—clothes.

She had her right elbow propped up on her things in a way that her hand disappeared behind the side of her face that I couldn’t see due to the angle at which she sat. It looked like her hand was holding up her head, and her forearm and wrist were covered by a black wristband.

And she was talking. At first I thought she had a Bluetooth device in her hidden ear, but after a while it dawned on me that she was actually talking to a young lady sitting across the aisle from her in the center-facing seats on that side of the bus, although she never looked at her.


At work, I got an unheard of type of phone call. My insurance agent’s office called to tell me that they could save me about $325 on my upcoming home and auto policies. My coverage wouldn’t change, but they would have to re-write my policies in order to do it.

I had a fun e-mail exchange with one of the agent’s reps, a part of which I’ve recounted here:

Hello, I hope you are doing well. Per our conversation a little while ago we were discussing rewriting your home and automobile insurance to save you some money. I do need to ask you a few underwriting questions if I could please.

  1. Do you own any dogs? If yes what breed and do they have any bite history?
  2. Do you own a trampoline or swimming pool?
  3. What is your occupation?
  4. Do you drive your cars back and forth to work? If yes how many miles roughly one way?

If you will answer these few questions and send them back to me I will then print off the applications and email those to you for your signatures. Thank you for your time and business! I hope you have a great day!

To which I replied:

  1. No animals whatsoever. No plants either. Nothing living in my house but me so I can be gone as long as I want to whenever I want to. 🙂
  2. No trampoline, but I do have jumper cables, but they don’t actually jump, so don’t pose a homeowner’s risk. 🙂 No swimming pool — neither a personal one nor one for the townhouse community/association.
  3. I am a Technical Communicator (or you can put Technical Writer, if that makes more sense to more people).
  4. My car sits in my driveway all week. I take the city bus, or the university’s Wolfline bus to work every day, and I talk about my bus trips in my daily blog in what I refer to as the “buscapdes” section at the beginning of each entry: http://dailyafirmation.livejournal.com./

To which she replied:

Oh my goodness you sound fun!

  1. I understand, I live with my 21 year old son and have very little responsibilities, I must admit it is kind of nice.
  2. I too have jumper cables, unfortunately though I am too chicken to use them so what good are they? (Yes they are there in case of emergencies and hopefully they will be used very little).
  3. I also do not have a swimming pool but do enjoy using others.

As you already know I am a Nationwide insurance agent and I know very little about using public transportation but I will be checking out your blog from my home. I know you did not ask but you made my day with your responses it is always fun to find someone with some personality! Thank you for sharing, your answers are great also for insurance, I will be sending you a homeowners and automobile insurance application to sign. Happy St Patrick’s day!

Fun, fun, fun! Welcome to the fray, Toni.


I caught the 6:00 bus home, and have to admit that since it was such a late bus, I was hoping I might run into Ann. No luck, however.

In an unheard of event, the bus windows were open on the bus—as they should have been with today’s utterly fantastic weather!

Equally rare, Library Man was aboard.

At one of the later stops before mine, a lady got on and started to pay her fare, when the lady sitting across from me yelled to her, “You want my day pass? I gettin’ ready to get off the bus and carry my butt home. Won’t use it no more today.”

I watched the bus driver’s reaction to this transaction, thinking she might object to it, but she didn’t.


I took a two-hour nap before heading out to the St. Patrick’s Day Trailer Park Prize Night show at Flex.

Alex, Steven, and Bob were out, and the four of us hung out.

“Miss Trixie” was the emcee tonight, and in the spirit of “If you don’t have anything nice to say…” (sit next to me!), that’s all I’m going to say about that.

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