getting here
I suppose I could give details about my evening last night, but most readers of this blog would regard it as way TMI. Suffice it to say I spent three hours at Steamworks and I had a good time. Don't know what Steamworks is? Look it up. Maybe not at work.
I had the last of the leftover Maggi noodles for dinner, just a quick reheat of a lunch that never made it to work, thanks to Kara from the Amy's company leaving me with a full paper sack of about eight samples of new flavors of their frozen meals, just for me! This happened two days ago. Yesterday I had the one I was most excited about, the Meatless Pepperoni Mac & Cheese Bowl -- and it was amazing. I even emailed Kara, CCing Molly who actually made the delivery, to say so. (I had to scour months of emails to find Molly's email address, as it's almost always just Kara who communicates with me directly. I go the extra mile.) Okay, I suppose "amazing" is a relative term. It's amazing by frozen meal standards. Is it worth actually buying when I don't have free samples of it? Maybe, when it's on sale! Its frontline retail, for a 9oz bowl, is $5.29. That's even at a margin 5% lower than our target margin for the category. But! The first half of December it's on sale for $3.99, which I can buy potentially at 25% off, thereby paying all of $2.99. Now that's a decent price.
The bag had two of these in it. I had the other one for lunch again today. I think I'll share at least a few of these with Shobhit though, and bring them home. At least the Indian meal ones that are in there, anyway.
Shobhit wants to pick me up from work to go straight to our payday grocery shopping today, since I'm going to Jennifer and Eric's tomorrow for their annual Halloween party and staying the night. So, I did not ride my bike today -- although, in the end, I did grab a LimeBike to ride the rest of the way from downtown. That single mile cost me $1.45 thanks to their new pricing structure, which in the past would have cost me only a dollar. That's literally a 45% mark-up. And since there's now the base $1 for grabbing the bike and then a per-mile charge, that percentage only increases the farther you go. I'm kind of inclined to use up what few dollars I have in my account, and then just say, fuck those guys. Especially since 90% of the available bikes around town are the fucking electric bikes, which always had a higher cost and so I have always tried to avoid those. (I only used one once, and discovered the cost to be triple that of the pedal bikes only after I used it. And that was back when it merely meant I had to pay $3 for the ride; it's no doubt more now.)
Anyway, my commute this morning was a bit of an exercise in frustration, although to be fair, ultimately I only have myself to blame. I should pay closer attention to the clock when I know how long it takes me to get ready, and I should have left my desk sooner and gotten into the shower. Had I done so literally one minute earlier, I would have made the #11 bus I was going for but barely missed. I was so preoccupied with getting to the edge of the sidewalk to look up the street to see if the bus was coming, while also tracking One Bus Away on my phone, I speed-walked dead into a No Parking sign, right in front of some other guy walking right by. He basically pretended he hadn't seen anything, or heard my short and loud "Aa!" when my face hit the metal pole.
So then I checked One Bus Away for other bus stops. #8 over at 15th & John running 11 minutes late. The #2 over at 14th & Union (in the opposite direction) running a couple minutes late, arriving in four minutes. I hauled ass over there and made it easily in four minutes. Problem was, One Bus Away apparently did not know the bus had made up some time, and it passed when I was still half a block away. I even thought maybe it was some other bus because the app said it had yet to arrive. But then it switched from "2 minutes away" to "scheduled arrival" having been three minutes earlier, and I gave up on that stop.
So, I checked the LimeBike app. It said there was a bike over at Cal Anderson Park. There was no fucking bike to be found where the app had on the map that there should be one. What a fucking pain in the ass. So then? I see the next #11 passing by! Jesus Christ. I really thought I would miss even this one, but the red light at Broadway was long enough that I barely made it. So, I bussed down Pine from Broadway to Third. This is just about one mile. Honestly I would have gotten there at the exact same time had I walked the mile and a half directly from home at the moment I actually had left my building. This is always the idiocy of inefficiently designed public transit. Okay, and my just not waking up in time.
As I said, though, I did grab a LimeBike downtown, since there was no bus coming soon enough to make it worth waiting, as I would get to work just as quickly by walking. The only way to save time now was to get on a bike, so that's what I did. And basically I it allowed me to get to work at 7:40 rather than probably 7:50. May aim is always to be at work at 7:30, but whatever. When riding my own bike I often get here as early as 7:20 or sometimes even 7:10 so it averages out.
[posted 12:20 pm]