~Monday~ I was ready to leave the house well before the next city bus, so I checked TVS for the current location of the Wolfline bus, which was in a place that I could get to the nearest stop just in time to catch.
At the stop, I made a note that that sign I reported—probably a month ago now—is still wrong.
I took a seat on the Wolfline #9 Greek Village that had a little partition between it and the seat to its right, which the person sitting in that seat was leaned back up against, putting his body in very close proximity to mine. As soon as I took my first breath there, I could tell that this man was unclean. And by unclean, I don’t mean his mind or his soul.
I arrived at work at 8:19, which is before the city bus would have arrived at the stop by my house at its most frequent time of 8:22.
My friend and colleague, Sarah, was back from her two week vacation in Rome and Greece, and because her husband had posted on Facebook that they’d lost her mother’s bag on the return flight, I asked her if she’d gotten it back yet.
She said when they finally went to pick it up at the (RDU) airport, it had a long rip along the front of the bag, but they had a new, replacement, bag ready there to give her! Amazing.
I had an extra busy work day for a Monday, my morning being consumed with the editing of a technical email that’s going out to about 80,000 user accounts about a conflict in Google accounts that’s going to happen soon and how to resolve that conflict when they see it, and then editing several pages going into this year’s information technology student calendar.
At the bus stop to go home, I was reminded again of that sign with erroneous information on it that the gotriangle.org folks haven’t fixed yet, when I got annoyed at something else about the bus system. I’m going to send them a follow up email about that sign still not being fixed and when I’m done bitching about that, I’m going to pose this question: Do any of the engineers who design these bus shelters actually ever use the shelters?
Let’s play “spot the design error” in the Hillsborough Street shelter. Here’s a picture I took while sitting on the seat that’s under the shelter, looking down Hillsborough Street to see if this bus is in sight yet. Hmmm.
I’m about a gazillion percent sure it’ll make no difference for this shelter; that is, that anyone would come out and change this one, but perhaps bringing it to someone’s attention, it might be taken into consideration on any shelters scheduled to be built in the future.
I got to the gym late—at about 8:00—and as soon as I walked in to the place, I smelled pizza. As it turns out, although it was the second Monday of the month, it was Free Pizza Monday. It was moved out a week from its regular—first Monday of the month—schedule due to last week being the 4th of July holiday.
After doing 300 (15 sets of 20) ab crunches, I upped my 30-minute cardio workout on the elliptical machine to 40 minutes, because I knew I was going to nab at least one slice of that pizza on the way out.
I was surprised that when I finished, which was a little after 9:00, there were still at least ten boxes of various kinds of pizzas left. Which is why I didn’t feel guilty taking two slices. Amazingly, though, I took them home and put them in the fridge for dinner tomorrow—for two reasons: 1) I’d already eaten dinner tonight, and 2) Tomorrow morning is my weigh-in morning.
I dropped by Flex at about 10:00, more for the Monday night $2.25 well drink special than for the karaoke truth-be-told. I was leaning on the pool table when this girl walked up to me smiling as if waiting for recognition on my face, but not saying a word until it got so awkward that I said, “Hi. Do we know each other?”
“Aren’t you Chris?” she asked.
My first thought was that she was meeting someone there whom she’d only met online or something, but the fact that she was a girl in a bar of mostly gay men, that seemed pretty unlikely.
“No, I’m John…” I said, “… and you’re?”
“Christie.”
“It’s nice to meet you, Christie.”
Then she said, “Wow, you have a twin. I can’t believe you’re not him. You look just like him.”
I really didn’t know what to say to that, so didn’t say anything, and she eventually said, “And that’s a good thing.”
Oh-kay, I’m thinking. But she’s not going anywhere, and she’s not talking. She’s just looking at me with her head cocked to one side a little. Awkward.
“Sooo, you gonna sing?” I asked.
“Yes, I am,” she said, and then she added, “Are you?”
“Oh no, I can’t sing,” I said and then gave her my usual karaoke spiel about how I can sing okay when I’m singing with someone who’s providing the melody, but in karaoke you’re supposed to be providing that, so it’s a very frustrating thing to me. “But I enjoy coming and singing along in the peanut gallery,” I concluded.
“Oh, it doesn’t matter if you can sing or not. It’s just for fun.”
Shortly after that “Christie and Peter” were called to the stage and they sang Lady Gaga’s Bad Romance, and oh my god; she obviously believed what she said about it not mattering if you could sing or not. They were so off key that the song was to be recognized only by its words.
I think I left before they finished, and since it was still pretty early, I dropped by The Borough for one drink, but after sitting at the bar for about two minutes and not being waited on in spite of the place not being at all busy, I left and went home.