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.