the commute

It's not exactly a pleasure to have rejoined the ranks of sorry individuals who are forced to drive their cars, sit in traffic and deal with the office parking lot to get into work everyday.

Old commute: less than a tenth of a mile, downhill on my bike.
New commute: less than four miles on two different highways in my car.

My first thought on my new route was the realization that this was not a good way to start the day off and I could potentially get into a sour mood before even stepping foot in the office.  Morons driving too slow, jerks driving too fast,  idiots turning and wasting my time, traffic signals. . . all of these things are a bit difficult for me to handle early in the morning.

Somehow I still think it's going to take less than 2 minutes to get to work and I get surprised each morning when 9 o'clock rolls around and I am still more than a mile away.

And when I finally do arrive at the parking lot, though I have many times walked across the whole thing on my way home, I get upset that I have to park in the back and walk all that way to get into the building.

What this new distance from work to home also means is that I have to figure out what the rest of the world does on their lunch break.  Gone are the days of buzzing home in 5 minutes, putting on my pajamas and kicking back for a solid 45 minutes of TV vegetation time.

Honestly, I'm still far better off that those crazy people who work like 40 miles from where they live and have apparently have some strange desire to spend a good portion of their day on IH-35 (aka 'the parking lot') or Mo-Pac (aka Slo-Pac) with the rest of their commonsense challenged brethren.

What is wrong with those people?  They must really love torture.  Or suburbia.

bump in the pm

If it isn't drunk 20-somethings, a drag race or fire alarm we aren't used to hearing it at night.  We get scared when something unidentifiable breaks the silence of the new house.

Up in our three-story concete fortress, life was lived in a hum of Congress traffic and there was almost never a moment of silence.  We heard when our downstairs 'neighbors' watched action movies or played video games, sufferred squeeky tires in the parking garage and knew to brace for vocal, drunked debachery every weekend night when the bars closed - a car alarm at the very least.

Tucked into this quiet neighborhood the cats' pitterpatter echos off the bare walls and floors. And I sware, last night I heard a gaggle of coyote pups screaming in the backyard.

The new house is very dark and quiet which is nice, but spooky.