Frobie

Let’s get some global warming up in here.

Another story about MUNI and the lack of common decency displayed by its riders.

This morning I found a nice place to stand in front of the single seats. These are coveted spots since standing there does not obstruct other riders from walking by. Also, when the seated passenger leaves, you get a single seat to yourself.

I am standing there minding my own business when the bus stops to pick up the last batch of passengers before hitting the freeway. I am holding the overhead bar between two vertical bars. A fellow passenger holds the vertical bar to my right with her left hand. Another passenger further down is holding the bar to the right of her. The second passenger down recognizes the occupant of the seat I am standing by.
____________
| me | 1 | 2 |
The second passenger and seated passenger exchange exuberant greetings. The second passenger proceeds to change her hand hold from the first passenger’s right-hand bar to the same vertical bar the first passenger is using. This directly puts the second passenger in the first passenger’s standing space.
__________
| me | 1 2 |
The conversation between the two continue unabated by the obvious discomfort of the first passenger. A few minutes pass and the first passenger moves to squeeze between other passengers on the opposite side of the walkway. The second passenger doesn’t even apologize and steps into the vacant space. We are now in a situation where I am standing side by side with this person.
_________
| me | 2 |
She continues her conversation with the seated person. I’m thinking to myself that she’s probably going to stay where she is, right? She doesn’t need to get any closer. She is in perfect conversation distance from her friend, which is an arm’s length by the way.

My assumption was full of fail. She leans down towards her friend and speaks in a louder conversational voice. Conveniently for her, the backpack she is wearing pushes me out of the space which leaves me standing in the middle of the walkway with no handholds.
____
| 2 |
me

This recounting has been brought to you by the letter D.

Or what I thought was a ghost. I was rubbing my eyes just now and looked back up to the screen. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a ghostly apparition that looked like smoke curling into a vaguely humanoid form. When I turned to look, it disappeared. Is that how ghosts operate? They don’t let you look at them head on and only allow glimpses to fool your senses. Tricky bastards!

Amazing.

I can never live in the northeast. It’s cold now here in the Bay Area. I’d probably die in the cold winters up there.

The other day, the garbage company made available to the neighborhood three of those large open-top refuse containers for disposal of large items. This was a perfect opportunity to junk some of the things we had laying around the house.

Metal pipes, broken computer, broken vcr, old clothes–I bet they would have accepted the kitchen sink if asked.

Anyhow, we had purchased a new television set a few years ago and this was as good a time as any to make the actual replacement.
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I’ve been pretty busy to update the blog. I logged in just now and there were a thousand comments in the queue. All of them were spam comments. Makes you wonder if someone has developed a script to just go to wordpress blogs and enter comments.

…goes a long way.

I believe I spoke of this matter in the past. When you are packed into a sardine can with a number of other people, there is no space to maneuver, if by chance you wished to flee. I was in that state of hopelessness yesterday.

I was riding the 14x yesterday, the bus was packed to the rim. My standing position was in the middle of the aisle. I had to put my right foot perpendicular to the rotational axis of the earth while holding onto the top rail with my fingertips. Awkward, but I am use to the yoga-like positions by now.

So I am standing there, feeling sexually harassed by the amount of grinding going on when the bus makes sudden movements, when the guy to my right facing me has the mother-of-all sneezes.
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Having read an article on the airlines nickel-and-diming passengers, I realized Americans need a new curse word that is not an expletive. The British have a perfect example of a curse word that is not a bad word by itself. Their word is “bloody”. You see and hear it all the time in interviews and it never gets censored. Bloody this, bloody that, I am quite jealous.

A friend suggested “fricking” as a possibility since its use is prevalent now. But, “fricking” isn’t even a word itself. The word evolved from “fucking” when posters needed to evade form censors. The closest America has to a word to rival “bloody” is “damn”. But, “damn” does not hold the same impact as “bloody”. The word also does not roll off the tongue as easily.

I am drawing a blank. Maybe we should just steal the British word and modify it slightly for our own use. Booby? Body? Bodey? Booey?

Saturday having past reminded me of the adventure from last Saturday; I decided to go hiking with a group of people. The guy who invited me along on this trip occasionally writes for this blog, namely lilb612. He is a big buff on these outdoor activities with aspirations to climb the Half Dome in Yosemite, which I think is a crazy goal.

We started the day early around 8am. Yes. 8am. On a weekend. That’s crazy talk!

I rode with another buddy up to the starting point. His AC was on the fritz which was not so bad early in the morning, but something I would suffer through on the way back. Our destination was the southern part of Lake Tahoe off the I50. The difficulty of the hiking trip was supposedly easy to moderate. I had no idea what that meant. I expected to be walking trails that bicycles would have an easy time to travel over.
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