File this under trivial, but I just can’t stand when the morning’s dominos fall so off-kilterly. It started well. My buddy and former boss Timothy Hughes sent me a lead toward a gig that we both figured I could kick ass at, so I wasted no time completing the online application and getting that ball rolling toward whatever might be its disposition.
Of course, that process set me back about an hour, which meant I had to get a move on and compact another hour’s worth of stuff (litterbox and food/water bowl duty; iron a shirt, feed the tortoise; shower/shave, get my lunch together; set up the webcam; get dressed) into about 20 minutes if I was going to be able to get out the door with time to bus-train-train it to work for the second consecutive day, only this time so I could report about an hour earlier and thus leave at 4:30, the better to be able to get home in time to throw on my bike gear and roll over to participate in the Bike Winter ride scheduled for tonight.
Most of all that was moving right along up until I popped open the laptop and tried to fire up the webcam software. But the captured images weren’t uploading via my wireless internet connection and it took me a few precious minutes to diagnose the problem: instead of utilizing our wi-fi, the lapper was doggedly and unsuccessfully obsessing over a neighbor’s closed connection. This despite me having previously set up the computer to access only ours and remember the password so I didn’t have to, which I don’t.
But she’s a 7-year-old machine with more surprises than zebra with a 500-word vocabulary and a tendency to conveniently forget whatever instructions I’ve given and so all the force-quits and restarts just weren’t going to stop her from deciding that the “youngernet” wireless network, wherever that was, was the connection for her. And that meant I needed switch to manual and point her back to ours, but not without the wireless network’s password — which I have written down, but hell if I know where.
Long boring meaningless rant short, it wasn’t after killing some more time with some futile searching for the password that I forced myself to look at the clock to realize that not only was my mass-transit commute window closed, but that I’d now be lucky to get my crap together and get in my truck and put miles on the odometer and emissions into the air getting to work at my regularly scheduled nine o’clock hour.
Of course, thanks to lookeloos helplessly compelled to gawk at a three-car collision cleared to the shoulder on the 110 a couple miles from the 105 interchange the drive was even more frustrating and long, but the good news was that I arrived to work with a full two minutes to spare. The bad news is that I’ll be leaving work at 5:30 and unless there’s some traffic flow miracle that will speed me home in 45 minutes it looks like I’ll be missing out on tonight’s ride.
To make up for the gas use and pollutions loosed and the resultant inability, barring rain I’ll be getting up early and focused tomorrow on nothing but what I need to do to bike with The Phoenix to work and back.
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