Thesis is once again being tackled: I've spent two afternoons traipsing around the city posting notices in libraries to try to recruit interviewees. This took some intense planning. I haven't embraced winter cycling here in One Great City! so the bus it was. After spending a lot of time sprawled on the floor with a transit map and the whereabouts of each library, then alternating between the on-line trip planner and schedules, the idea of chaining these visits into one or two easy trips was lost. For the first time in a long time I thought, a car would be kind of handy right now. As would a cell phone... and a watch...
But really, it worked out fine. Who cares if you have to wait for a bus for twenty minutes when you have a book?
Yesterday and today were completely different. Yesterday was bright, clear, sunny and freezing cold. I wore my enormous jacket, but not my boots for some reason, headed south and eventually got lost in mall-parking-lot hell. One Great City!'s transit system does this strange thing where a bus with two or three quite different routes will have the same number, so it caught me that time. My feet froze waiting for the bus to backtrack and there was a long path-free stretch leading to one library due to drifting snow, but otherwise it was a fruitful venture because I got a call from an interested party that evening. Hopes are up!
Today was snowy, cloudy, muffled - you know, when the snow is like a blanket laid over the city and everything seems quiet and immediate? - and verging on warm. I wore a much lighter coat and big boots and cold did not come into the picture once. I waited at one bus stop for nearly half an hour with about a dozen teenagers, all pouring out of class. It was 2:30. Since when does school end so early? Wasn't there talk of starting and ending classes later because of the teenage struggle to get out of bed in the morning? Whatever. I felt very slightly like a tool standing in their midst.
Why do people sometimes say that they don't like to ride the bus? Maybe it's crowded at times, and one of them was a little smelly today, and but what a senses feast. I'm with The Shuffle Demons on this one.
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1 comment:
oh wow the shuffle demons. you are a wealth of old tunage. thank god no one dresses like anyone in that video anymore.
your bus trip and planning sounds like so much fun. I'll tell B all about it and maybe he'll finally become a bus taker.
we had that quiet muffled snow last night too. big flakes, I had a blast walking home in it.
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