Monday disguised as Tuesday

Confirmation that today is actually another Monday disguised as Tuesday:

*I was 1 1/2 blocks away from the bus stop only to see the bus turn the corner and then pull away (meaning a 10 minute wait in the cold for the next bus after walking the extra distance to my "route detour" bus stop - see yesterday's post for details)
*the pen explosion in my "cup o' pens" this morning (black ink all over me and the other pens and pencils; what's worse, it was one of my favorite pens!)
*my inability to keep track of what exactly I'm working on (I actually created a to do list for the first time to help me out)
*my colleague can't remember her locker combo
*a book truck of very heavy and large volumes, which are dirty and crumbling, and too heavy to push without help (doesn't that violate some OSHA law?), must be transported from the 6th floor to the 1st floor and be dealt with "promptly"; naturally they aren't as simple to deal with as initially indicated and may take weeks to figure out
*cubicle workstations being completely dismantled (side effect: work disruption due to noise of power tools and workers apparently swearing at each other - can you call a fellow worker a "dickhead" in an office that isn't yours?) only to have the workers leave and they probably won't be back until tomorrow; meanwhile my colleague continues to wait to find out when exactly she'll be able to move into her cubicle
*my friend's cat insists that wake up time is 4am...for the fourth day in a row. Result: my friend overslept

Please feel free to add additional proof via comments on this post.

I think I saw some Girl Scout cookies sitting out. Good for my mood...bad for the diet.

Adventures with public transit

I woke up this morning to snow on the ground. Not a dusting, but based on my vehicle, a good 1 1/2 to 2 inches worth. This is too much for me to consider riding my bike because you can't see pavement. If it's a dusting and pavement is still visible, I'll ride. But when the pavement disappears beneath white stuff...forget it. I'm not taking chances as to what's underneath that white stuff.

[Side note: Aussie loves the snow. Loves it. Attacks it, bites it, snuffles through it, and generally looks happier than happy playing in the snow. This is great, except at 6:50AM when I'm trying to get her to do her business so I can get to work.]

So I figured my best course of action would be to take the bus. Now I've taken public transit all over the world. And SEPTA has this great online trip planner so all I have to do is plug in addresses and it gives me my options. So this is what I did. Early this morning. And the online planner told me that there was a stop 1 1/2 blocks from my house for my bus. I print out the schedule the website gives me and the planned route it gives me. Great. Easy. I can do this despite the fact that I haven't had coffee yet. So I leave the house with time to spare and walk to the stop. Only to be confronted with a nice little yellow sign that says:

"THIS STOP HAS BEEN TEMPORARILY DISCONTINUED. PLEASE PROCEED TO THE STOP AT X AND Y"

This is just fabulous. So I walk to the stop it tells me. Only to be confronted with a nice little yellow sign that says:

"THIS STOP HAS BEEN TEMPORARILY DISCONTINUED. PLEASE PROCEED TO THE STOP AT X AND Y"

You have GOT to be kidding me. Having already walked a good 3 blocks in the opposite direction of work, I make the executive decision to start walking in the direction of work as opposed to following the lovely yellow signs. I eventually find a stop for the bus the lovely SEPTA website told me I should take, and lucky me, a bus is coming along at that point. So I get on. The rest of the trip in is uneventful. But I'm still seething that nowhere in all of my planning was there any indication that ALL of the stops within 6 blocks of the one closest to me (remember, the one SEPTA told me to take) are "TEMPORARILY DISCONTINUED". Nowhere. You'd think they'd post detour information like that in the trip planner. But no. I checked when I got to work. What's worse they don't even include a disclaimer to check the specific route information and schedules for potential changes and detour information. It implies that all you need is the damn trip planner.

FYI, they do list detours on a separate page, but only if you go look up the route schedules and instead of clicking on the schedule for the route, click on the little orange circle with an "i" (for information). That's it. And it doesn't even give you specifics about where the new closest stops are, just that there's a temporary detour. And you can't even get to those pages from the trip planner. There's no link from the planner to the individual route schedules. Really. No joke.

God only knows what's going to happen when I try to take the bus home. Maybe I'll just walk the 2 miles...