Lots of whining, plus a Tarzan metaphor. Also, no photos. Sorry.

So, yeah, on Friday I managed to get myself to work on the bus and then from work to the wedding reception, and then kind friends drove me home from the reception, with a detour to Zuppas for post-reception soup and tomfoolery. If you knew just how much I long for simplicity and isolation on Fridays after work, this feat would be impressive to you, for I not only engaged in multiple social events that night, I took the bus! Where's my trophy?

The UTA bit was great, no complaints. But from the last UTA stop I had planned to use the University of Utah shuttle system to get within easy walking distance of the reception, which was at the U's Red Butte Gardens Orangerie. The U has a fancy website for its shuttles that shows you the names of all the routes, when/where they stop, what hours they run, and even shows you in real time where each shuttle is on its route. So I wrote down my option (the Gold line), got off at the right stop, and waited.

I don't have a smart phone, so I was relying on what the website had told me about shuttle arrival times. The Blue line shuttle showed up, but I let it go by because I knew the Gold line was coming and it would get me close to my destination. But ten minutes after the Gold line shuttle was supposed to arrive it still hadn't come. So I followed the instructions on the shuttle sign at the stop and texted their system for info on the next shuttle arriving at that stop. Twice it told me there were no shuttles enroute--not for any of the various lines. I took that to mean that I'd misread the shuttle schedule and that there would be no help for me from the shuttle service, so I hiked up my maxi dress and started my hike up the hill, only to have a Gold line shuttle pass me two minutes later. Grrrr. Big FAIL on your fancy shuttle tracking technology, U of U. The walk wasn't bad, and it was pretty good exercise, which one needs after a day sitting at a desk, but I was miffed because I'd wanted to learn about the U's shuttle system, but was failed by flashy but useless technology. I'd wanted to prove that, like Tarzan, I could transfer effortlessly from figurative vine to figurative vine in my journey through the figurative tree tops and prove myself the figurative monarch of my urban jungle, but instead found myself figuratively bushwhacking down on the figurative jungle floor being figuratively bitten by figurative tropical fire ants. And as much as I love hiking, I didn't enjoy showing up for the fancy reception with a bit more glow than I'd wanted (that's where the fire ants come in). But after retreating into the Red Butte bathrooms to change into the nice dress and shoes I'd been hauling around in my backpack and to engage in some basic primping, I looked pretty good and felt good as well. I stashed my backpack behind a large potted plant and after some chatting with friends and congratulating the couple and drinking an Italian soda and eating a gourmet grilled cheese sandwich I retreated alone into the beautiful gardens and came back just in time to beg the last of my departing friends to drop me off close to my house. This led to an invitation to join them at dinner, which means, you will note, that my decision to take the bus to the reception rather than drive to the reception resulted in one of my rare voluntary Friday night social excursions. I was socially exhausted by the end of the night, but had some fun memories to show for it, as well as the knowledge that God was pleased with my valiant stab at fake extroversion--which thing would not have happened but for the humility that carlessness (and shuttle carelessness) sometimes forces upon one. Which humility is good to experience, now and then, especially for those of us who have the option of driving everywhere.

As for the rest of the Memorial Day weekend, I'd invited my niece up for a sleepover Sunday night and a play day on Monday, and had planned to take her back to Sandy on TRAX when the fun was over. But I had forgotten: UTA doesn't think that people need public transit on holidays. That's because the people running UTA are like me: they own cars and when they ride public transit, it's to feel warm and fuzzy and socially responsible and maybe get some work done during their commute. But there are people who rely on public transit for their lives to function. They can't afford to buy a car, or can't afford to both drive their cars regularly and feed their families. And guess what, UTA? These tend to be the people who are forced to work on holidays, while the rest of us play. They're the ones running the retail shops where you get your Memorial Day bargains and the gas stations where you fill up your Bimmer. And they need the buses to run so they can get to their jobs and sell you cheap junk you no longer have space for. So do yourselves a favor, and let them get to their jobs on the holidays. It was no big deal to me and my niece, because I have a car and the option to drive it without breaking the bank. But it's a big deal to others. Also, we can't complain that people keep driving and polluting our valley air if our public transit system is not comprehensive enough to make relying on it for daily transportation a reasonable prospect. Once a person has spent the considerable amount of money to buy and service and insure a car (because he knows the buses don't run on holidays and mostly don't run on Sundays and only sorta run on Saturdays), you can't be surprised when he chooses to drive it more and more often--because it's way more convenient than a bad bus system, and the cost of car ownership usually doesn't make sense if you're only going to use your car when the buses aren't running. And of course once you've decided you need a car to fill in the public transit gaps, you note that the bus fares for most trips are more expensive than gas for the car, so where exactly is the incentive to transition to bus riding? If people could get where they needed on the buses every day of the year, then they could dispense with the cost of buying and insuring and maintaining a car and at THAT point being a regular bus rider would make sense financially, even with the current high fares.

Rant over.

Post over.

Another confessional post. Read at your own risk of fatal boredom.

It turns out that the extra hours spent on the bus each week, while they are usually productive hours, make me less inclined to spend more time when I get home sitting in front of a computer and writing blog posts. So hallelujah! If this blog is going to happen at all regularly, it's going to get less verbose. Which is good for everyone (anyone?) involved.

So....in confessions, that last post on May 6 was the only time I rode the bus that week. My excuse was that I had to buy a bunch of plants for myself and others that Saturday at a special one-day parking lot sale with no shopping carts. On Thursday my coworker offered me the use of her kids' old wagon for plant hauling, and I really needed the wagon. As I was unwilling to speed walk 13 minutes to the bus stop after work on Friday while pulling a big orange wagon behind me, I realized I'd have to jettison my bus plans and drive. If I'd been more on top of things earlier in the week and gotten my bus riding in, I would have been able to reach my goal while having wiggle room for later crises such as wagon hauling.  Life lessons. Life lessons.

To my credit, I did ride THREE WHOLE TIMES the following week (twice to work and also to Sandy on Saturday), even though I had a bunch of purchased vegetable seedlings in my care that needed sunlight during the day until they could be passed off to those who requested them or planted by me. My apartment cannot provide sufficient light and so in past years I've driven the plants to work with me and put them in a sunny spot in my workplace garden during work hours, and then driven them back home to spend the night in my car. I had to get creative on the two days I took the bus to work, leaving the plants in my car at night so they didn't get spoiled by the warm indoor night temperatures, and then transferring them to the sunniest spot in my house while I was at work (because they would cook if I left them in my car for sunlight while I took the bus to work). I don't think they suffered too much from this on and off indoor treatment, and it was nice to feel that my efforts to garden were accompanied by some efforts to not cancel out the ecological benefits of said garden by adding unnecessary pollution to the air.

I'm sure Mr. and Mrs. Goodwill intended their building to be used for more noble purposes than providing handy bathroom sinks for rinsing the yogurt-drenched possessions of public transit riders, but I trust they would be gratified by my gratitude all the same.

Also notable that week: the Great Yogurt Explosion of 2014. Let's just say that Australian-style yogurt is just as non-portable as it appears, even if you rubber-band the lid to the tupperware. Learn from my folly, dear reader, and choose a thicker yogurt for your bus adventures. Thankfully, for my cleanup job I was once again able to make use of the convenient and clean bathroom in the delightfully named Wilford W. and Dorothy P. Goodwill Humanitarian Building that is right by my transfer stop. Quick in--rinse off apples and avocado and paperwork and bag--and quick out, in time to catch the connecting bus. The Goodwills--they had to be philanthropists, right? They had no choice. Can't very well be a greedy oil magnate with that name.

And riding the TRAX out to Sandy on Saturday with a box of plants for my parents was fun. I sat across from two little kids who wanted to know all about the plants I was planting and check them out. Oooo! Pleasant conversations with strangers on public transit! I'm not such a freaky, freaky recluse after all.

Sad observation from today's trip to work: one of the houses on my pretty walk had burned down last night. On the walk in to work the news trucks were there, filming the firefighters preparing to demolish the charred shell of the house. On my walk back to the bus stop after work, the house had been demolished, with this Pooh Bear doll perched on the rubble. So sad. Such a cute house with beautiful flowering vines all along the fence. According to the neighbors, no one was hurt, so that's good.

This week I'm atoning for one of my short weeks by riding to work three days (oooo!) Or at least that is my hope. Two down, and hopefully tomorrow as well. The trick with tomorrow is I have to go straight from work to a fancy wedding reception up at the Univeristy of Utah's Red Butte Gardens, which is a fair walking distance from the last UTA stop. Will I really do this, or am I too lazy? Will I take fancy reception clothes, change into them, and leave my other clothes at work so I don't have to walk into the reception with a big bag full of clothes like a transient? Do the walking thing from the last bus stop to Red Butte (and carry the dress shoes in my purse), or try to figure out the late-night University shuttle system to get a ride closer to Red Butte to eliminate some of the walking?  If I do it, I'll reward myself by bumming a ride home from the reception with one of my friends. I only have so much stomach for Friday night after-work adventures.

And....I've got to get to bed if those adventures stand any chance of happening. Can't think of anything clever or pithy to end with, so peace out.

Excuses, excuses.

Oh, the rigors of keeping up a blog. Especially a blog with a Central Theme. Did I really start an entire blog about riding the bus?

Apparently I did.

I have to keep reminding myself that the primary goal here is to force myself to reflect on and change both my habits and my attitudes, and not necessarily to be entertaining. So here goes the excuses for my poor bus riding and bus blog posting the past several days:

First excuse: Two friends left town in the same week and both asked me to check on their stuff while they were away, which I was very happy to do (friend #1: cats and house; friend #2: mail and house). They live on opposite sides of Salt Lake and so doing these checks on the bus would have taken hours and hours, if I even managed to get it all done before the buses stopped running. I'm only so ambitious.

Second excuse: Another friend's wedding happened in Sandy on Tuesday, one of my regular bus days, and getting to the wedding on the bus after work would have taken almost two hours, even starting the journey from my work in Millcreek (seriously, UTA? two hours?) So I drove on Tuesday so I could get to the wedding in a reasonable amount of time, then drove my car on Wednesday so I could do house-checking rounds, and then rode the bus to work on Thursday, and again drove on Friday so I could do more house-checking. So only one bus day last week. On the bright side, I planned well and integrated all the errands I needed to do in areas near their houses so that I wouldn't need to do as much driving on Saturday.

Third excuse: I spent Saturday trying to hack a vegetable garden plot out of an inhospitable desert wilderness. And then all other tasks got moved around and blogging got knocked out until today.

So it was an unusual week, but it shouldn't be hard to make up for it this week or next.

On to bus riding observations:

I've resumed helping a friend with his book, so I now have an Official Important Project to work on while riding to and from work. To be all productive, y'know. As I've said, the bus route I take is really pretty, so focusing on this Official Important Project is often hard, but I'm getting better (it would be impossible to concentrate at all if the book weren't so inherently interesting--the topic is the lost 116 pages of the Book of Mormon--it's going to be a stunner, and when it's published I'm sending you a copy for Christmas). The bus is great for such tasks because when one would ordinarily get frustrated solving a problem related to one's Official Important Project and wander off to the kitchen to stress-eat or wander outside to exercise in the name of avoidance, one finds oneself trapped on a bus with no eating or exercising options, so one soldiers on. And one inevitably feels better about oneself for sticking with one's task than one would feel after avoiding it. Hurray for enforced discipline.

Do you know what this thing is?

On Thursday, while making notes on a book chapter draft and occasionally looking up to stare at the bus goings on, I finally figured out what this odd structure is. It is in one of the buses I ride regularly, and I'd puzzled the last weeks over its intended function. I thought it might be some sort of luggage holder, but a Google image search for "UTA luggage cage thing" had failed to call up any sort of enlightening information. My recent epiphany: it's a ski corral (a Google image search for "UTA ski bus" confirmed this). The route I ride isn't a ski resort route, but I guess the ski buses get used for non-ski routes during the off season. So now you know what this thing is if you encounter it. I think it would be a handy spot to choose if there were only standing room left on the bus. You wouldn't have to hold on to anything to stay upright--you could just lock yourself into your own personal bus corral and it would keep other humans from invading your space or picking your pockets.

Today as I walked that last stretch to work I passed a neat and well loved little yard where an older man was drinking what looked like tea. He was wearing a dress shirt and vest, sitting in his garden at a fancy white filigreed patio table set under a tree, next to a Roman numeraled garden clock on a pole. Near him was a fancy monogrammed "T" pendant stuck in the ground, presumably his last initial. The whole scene reminded me of my time in England, where people took their tea and their family names and their gardens very seriously--where the garden was another room of the house, meticulously tidy and carefully thought out. It made me happy. Yet another little scene I never would have seen if speeding by in a car. And one day I will be a yard owner and plan out every detail and then sit under a tree and drink in all those beautiful details with satisfaction and smile at passersby envying my garden and its many charming details. One day.....

In other news, I am now the owner of a pretty nice camera (thanks, KSL classifieds!), and I even took pictures to add to this posting in the hope of making it a bit less dull, but somehow managed to lose said pictures in the process of downloading them to my computer. Darned tricksy technological details, sucking my bus photos into the void. Next time. Next time.

While you're waiting (for the bus).

Yes, I have more to say. But it was a busy week and today will be the busiest of all and I may not get to blogging until tomorrow, so to make it look like I have my act together.....here's Bill Irwin and friends waiting for a NYC bus. Proof that waiting--for whatever--does not have to be a drudgery.



Incidentally, one of the delightfulest moments of my life was getting to chat briefly with Bill Irwin in NYC (thanks, Leah!) I've been one of his groupies since I was a kid, and I totally believe he does this stuff at bus stops.