A Good Christmas
Saturday. Breakfast at the usual cafe followed by filling the car with gas (the price, at least, was 40 cents a gallon less than the last time I filled it), a trip over to buy food for Ms. Emmy and a larger than usual lunch, as is my habit, after drinking like a fish the night before with MRE and MRS up in MRS’ house in the Oakland Hills. There once was a time when people in my line of work could scrape together the payments on such houses, but that was long ago when the world was young and a starter house built on a postage stamp lot could be had for less than a million dollars. Nice, though, drinking home brew up on a hill, watching the sun set fire to San Francisco in the distance. Here in Oakland.
You did that some weeks ago and complained about what it did to your head the next morning.
That was then, this is now and my head is coming around, thank you. A printer stand I've been thinking about buying for the last three years arrived on Thursday. I assembled it that evening and moved my three printers off the hollow core door desk to free up space for, well, whatever strikes my attention. The bedroom is in order and the computer area next to the kitchen (where normal people put a dining room table) is also coming together. Small stuff you say? I don't. Big doings here around the apartment, let me tell you. MRE, when I mentioned this to him, said in obvious surprise: “You're actually getting ready to move!” Well, yes. Getting ready to move is not the same thing as moving, you understand, but it shows some seriousness of purpose.
I read a notice on the bus last week that said they are taking in the old 31-day unlimited ride tickets and exchanging them for the new $10 more expensive 31-day unlimited ride tickets through the middle of December. I have five of them, accumulated over these years through the company's subsidized commute ticket program and was more than fried when they first said they couldn't be used after the middle of October and that you couldn't turn them in for new ones with or without a payment.
Five tickets is $300 dollars. I've always thought of them as my cushion against the day I found myself out of a job - something that's been coming “any day now” for the last five years - and I was pissed. Now they say they'll let me trade them in with a $10 payment. My guess is other people were similarly unhappy with their screw the riders policy or they'd never have made this decision. Another sign of progress? First the apartment, now a grudging sign of humanity from a local transit system? Miracles both, hard to say which is the greater? Maybe this is going to be a good Christmas?
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