Bus Rides in Summer

This morning, I got off the Route 80 bus at the bottom of North Capitol street to switch to the DC Circulator bus as the noise in the Route 80 bus was just too loud for me. Everyone was having extreme cell phone calls at 8:45 a.m. in the morning, telling off their kids or screaming at their spouses or demanding something from somebody or telling the dentist they were going to be late, or things like that. Plus the bus was crowded; even though I got a seat, I found myself jammed into an inside seat by a very large man who, of course, was yelling into his cell phone the whole time the bus meandered its way down North Capitol street from my street to the Post Office at the corner. And everyone was standing and lurching into one another at every stop and looking like they could bite someone if you looked at them the wrong way. At the Florida Avenue intersection a very drunk looking older guy was yelling at the bus waving his fist, looking already like he was over-heated and quite dehydrated. Even more people piled onto the bus so, feeling more than just slightly claustrophobic, I got off before the Massachusetts Avenue turn to transfer to a nice uncrowded Circulator bus which pulled up almost immediately. Since that's the beginning of that route, there were only three people on the bus and I got a wide seat all to myself. This lasted until 7th street when a huge crowd got on bringing gusts of hot August air in with them, turning the bus into another hot, human-filled metal container. But no one was making loud cell phone calls; instead they all seemed to have plugs in their ears attached to those IPod music things so they couldn't hear anybody and clearly didn't want to talk to anyone. The bus got caught in traffic and took ten minutes to go from 11th to 14th streets due to some tie-up involving an out-of-town car backing into moving traffic just to drive the rest of us crazy in the heat in the summer. Bus rides can be a humbling experience! Lord, get me through today!

Aggravating Glitches in the Ole City Today

I should have known when I missed the bus this morning that this was one of those days when things would go wrong. Once at work it turned out my computer was infected with some nasty virus that SOMEONE had sent me so I couldn't use it. I tried to use another available computer but all the settings and seating and configurations were not familiar so I gave up and took a break. I went to the bank to deposit some checks and guess what, there was no pen to fill out the form that goes with the deposits and I hadn't carried my bag with pen with me as I'm trying to carry less with the slipped disk I have. There was no one around to borrow a pen from so I trudged back to my office for a pen and tried it again. Lo and behold there was a pen at the bank by then and which I didn't need. Some trick that! Then I went down to the Metro station to see if I could get loaded on my Smartrip card the money that WMATA owes me -- from when a bus ate my $40 when attempting to add money to the Smartrip card on a bus. Guess what? I waited too long at Step #3 of the Smartrip reload process and it timed me out. Guess what? I tried it twice more and it still said 'Transaction Canceled.' Determined to get MY FORTY DOLLARS, and at the suggestion of the Metro station manager, I trudged again, in the heat, back aching, to another Metro station, and Lo and Behold, the card loaded the $40. So something worked. Determined to see if I was now on a good luck roll, and looking forward to lying on my back on a nice soft bed, I went home and found all the electric clocks blinking again --a sure sign that PEPCO turned the power off again. The neighbors tell me they do that to save power but I think it's because this is an old neighborhood with old wires and overloaded transformers and the demand is high (all those YOUNG PEOPLE with their always-on battery charging laptops & iPhones & iPods & iPads, air-conditioning on all day set high and X-boxes and TVs going all the time). But fortunately for PEPCO, they had the power on and I was able to lie down in some cool air and gather my wits from all the glitches of the day. Then I looked at my garden and thanked God for green and pink things.