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Rode my motorcycle into work this morning.

(it’s a gum cig… yes, I blew out the powder first.. because i’m a badass..)

One of the fun things about moving to a rural place from the city is that I can now watch birds other than pigeons, crows, and sparrows. (I used to like pigeons, but after living in a city rife with them for 5 years, I’m convinced they’re evil and out to take over the world. Like roaches. Maybe in conjunction with the roaches. And republicans.)

Rural life isn’t a new thing for me - I grew up in the Midwest - so I do know how to identify quite a few birds. But there are birds out here in the Great Northwest that are new to me. I never saw a cormorant in the wild until we came out here. And now that we’re away from the city, there’s a junco who comes and visits. I can hear him jabbering away in the trees even when I can’t see him. But the feathered friend who most often puts in an appearance is our downy woodpecker. He comes and perches in the river birch over our fence and will sit there for hours on end. The woodpeckers I grew up seeing were much larger than this guy, with more red and less variation in their black and white feathers. This little guy is about the size of an overfed goldfinch. I’ve noticed that not only does he prefer the river birch, but he also has a favorite spot on the tree trunk. He’s always about three-quarters up the tree, on the east side, just below a certain branch. There must be good eating there or something.

(Sadly, you can’t hear the cool WAAAAHHHWAHHHHWAHHHH sounds I am making….)

The items above are a history of my visual life. They physically document my life transitions, all the while filtering the very images that caused the transitions. I lived life through the looking glass[es]…

The top pair mark my transition from small town Midwesterner to overwhelmed big city West-Coaster. The middle is my assimilation into the quirky hipster area I settled in to after a few years here in Seattle. The contacts are from my short-lived athletic body-sculpting stint. And finally the sleek, intelligent, 30-something glasses as I edged my way into the more professional computer engineering roles here in Washington.

I mention all the things above because last wednesday I lost those physical reminders of my past. Lost them for the good.

My company touts the importance of a healthy non-work life. To that end they encourage vacations . More importantly, they just switched to a use it or lose it PTO system. I needed to take 5 weeks vacation before the end of the year.

A couple months ago I looked at the group calendar and picked weeks at random to make use of that PTO time. One of them was the week of July 10th. I got it because everyone had taken off the previous week and it was wide open.

As I pondered what to do, an idea struck me. An idea that had been making me return to the same website over and over again for the last three years straight.

On Tuesday morning I packed up my car and drove 150 miles to Vancouver, British Columbia. Tuesday I had hours worth of eye tests. Wednesday I had North America’s leading Lasik pioneer slice open my cornea, peel it back, and shoot laser beams into my eyes. Thursday I had more eye exams.

On Thursday afternoon I drove 150 miles back home. With nothing, except for life itself, between me and the lovely views I was seeing…

Ok.  What’s with Fridays?  Is it the cumulative stress of the week?  Is Friday the point where the dam just breaks and all those pent-up frustrations need to be expressed or you’ll just die?

So once again we had a relatively new bus driver this morning.  Who happened to be a whole 3 minutes early at the stop.  Now most (read normal) people would know that this is a possibility (probability) and plan accordingly.  Buses are early.  Buses are late.  Some buses break down and never ___ing show up at all.  You roll with the punches - that’s just the way it is with public transportation.  You just deal.

Yeah.  Tell that to the guy who confronted the bus driver about it.  And when I say confronted, I mean he was confrontational.  He didn’t say “Oh, by the way, did you know that you’re a little early this morning?”  No no no no.  That would have been the polite way, and really - who’s polite anymore? 

First, a little background about the irate passenger.  I know he works for Washington Mutual in their IT department.  I know he hates his job and that he thinks everyone (bosses and underlings alike) is an idiot there.  I know that he complains about it every bloomin’ chance he gets.  (Yes, he’s one of those.) 

So he verbally attacks the bus driver after the bus driver kindly points out that he’s new to the route and that the bus times changed slightly in June.  Irritated passenger suddenly morphs into enraged self-righteous passenger actually yelling at the bus driver now (while said driver is carefully negotiating those hairpin turns on the way to Fall City).  The bus driver even showed him his route card, showing the stops and the stated times.  I thought the passenger was going to hit him.  I almost wish the driver had kicked him off. 

Anyone who has ridden the Seattle bus system knows that drivers have time points along the route.  If they’re running a little bit early, there are certain stops where they can sit for a minute or two and let the clock catch up, so to speak.  This keeps them from being too early at their larger bus stops - say at the Park & Ride stops.  Our bus stop is not a time point.  I make a point of being at that bus stop 10 minutes before the bus is due to arrive.  Afterall, what’s 10 minutes when the commute is nearly 90?.  This is what books are for.  It’s just as easy to read my book while waiting for the bus as it is to read it while on the bus. 

Yeah.  Someone should explain this to Angry IT-Guy.  It just won’t be me.

New Dawn Climbing Rose Bud

New Dawn Climbing Rose

First Delphinium Bloom

The Seattle bus has always been a rather interesting experience for me.  Sometimes good, sometimes terrifying, but never really boring.  From having my hair pulled to people getting stabbed or falling down drunk, or being surrounded by police officers with guns drawn, or even once being T-boned by a speeding pickup truck… like I said, never boring.

The Snoqualmie route has taken some getting used to.  For one thing, the commuting time ranges anywhere from 75 to 90+ minutes.  The area between Snoqualmie and Issaquah is at times jaw-dropping gorgeous, so it’s somewhat worth the long commute just to see that every day, twice a day.  (Much lovelier than gazing at the graffitti that seems to multiply overnight in the city.)

Another issue has been the drivers.  For the most part, they’re fantastic.  But for the past few months our morning drivers have all been “fillers” for the route.  Which means I may see the same driver 2 or 3 times before there’s another new face behind the wheel in the morning.  This means that the drivers are not at all familiar with the route.  (Which anyone who has driven the sharply twisting road between Snoqualmie and Fall City will tell you is not a good thing - especially not when it involves tons of steel traveling at a high rate of speed.)  Several drivers have actually used the PA system to ask passengers for directions. 

Well this morning was another new face behind the wheel.  And I knew this even before he opened the door.  How?  Well, the big tip-off was when he entered the bus stop pull-off area from the wrong direction.  Which meant he needed to make a 360 degree turn to go the way we needed to go.  (If you’ve ever ridden one of the very long articulated buses, you know this is impossible without the clearance of half a football field.)  So we did a little off-roading.  Dinging the magnolia tree, crossing the street, blocking traffic, narrowly missing a street lamp (with a lovely hanging flower basket, by the way), hopping the curb into the bowling alley parking lot, narrowly missing the trailer filled with the Kiwanis leftover fireworks from the 4th, and finally pulling out onto the right street in the right direction.  I guess I should just be thankful that the road at that point doesn’t follow the river very closely.  Otherwise I think we may have found out if those articulated buses are amphibious.

We also nearly ended up in Redmond rather than in Seattle.  If a passenger hadn’t yelled out “LEFT!” when he did, I think we just may have ended up on the wrong side of Lake Washington.  (Maybe they should have amphibious buses.)

But all of this is nothing compared to the afternoon driver.  The one that cracks offensive terrorist jokes and wears the bandanna around his head like Rambo.  This one makes my stomach plummet every time I see him behind the wheel.  The man drives like Evel Knievel on crack.  He seems to take sharp turns as a challenge and is more likely to hit the gas than the brake.  After he clipped the guard rail on one very high turn (that just so happens to be at the top of a rather cliff-like hill), I opted to work until 5:30 and catch the later bus.  But there are days that I just can’t stand to sit in my cubicle any longer so I roll the dice and hope that either he’s not the driver that night, or that he won’t send us plunging off any cliffs or speeding headlong into any logging trucks.  When he drives, I keep my head down and eyes firmly on the pages of my book.  If I can’t see the scenery flying past, the cars he nearly runs over, or the looming doom, I can just make it without screaming “FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, SLOW DOWN!”

So all things considered, off-roading in the bowling alley parking lot isn’t such a bad commute afterall.

Her head rests upon his shoulder, her face is upturned to his, her bare arm is almost around his neck, her partly nude swelling breast heaves tumultuously against his, face to face they whirl on, his limbs interwoven with hers, his strong right arm around her yielding form, he presses her to him until every curve in the contour of her body thrills with the amorous contact. Her eyes look into his, but she sees nothing; the soft music fills the room, but she hears it not; he bends her body to and fro, but she knows it not; his hot breath, tainted with strong drink, is on her hair and cheek, his lips almost touch her forehead, yet she does not shrink; his eyes, gleaming with a fierce, intolerable lust, gloat over her, yet she does not quail. She is filled with the rapture of sin in its intensity; her spirit is inflamed with passion and lust is gratified in thought. With a last low wail the music ceases, and the dance for the night is ended, but not the evil work of the night.

–T.A. Faulkner, 1892

“This antidance treatise, written by an ex-dancing master, is devoted to condemning the waltz.”