Another day

I was on a bit of a roll there last week, and I even had this great idea for a post on Sunday which was going to involve lots of scanning of my comics and my son’s picture books to highlight the all-too-eerie parallels between post-apocalyptic dystopias and learning to count to ten, BUT … apparently the kinda-sort version of functioning which is all our main household computer is now capable of does not include recognizing the scanner any longer. So much for that. Again, I have no doubt that the computer situation will sort itself out in the next couple of months, during which time I’ll simply have to hold that thought. But once the blog-train went off the rails on Sunday, the Monday holiday didn’t stand much of a chance, especially when so much of yesterday ended up dedicated to getting my car its dual inspections. (It passed. Though I needed to buy new windshield wipers to make it happen. Ah well.)


So the little guy is healthy once more (at least insomuch as the concept applies to a two-year-old’s immune system in the dead of winter), back at daycare today and by all reports pretty happy about it, and his mother is on Day Five of six days in a row reporting to work, and I’m once again safely ensconced in my cubicle after braving the iced-over pre-dawn wastes. After four consecutive days at home I was looking forward to a change of scenery if nothing else, but of course the day had to begin with the commute and yet another reminder that the Metro system makes so little sense to me that it hurts my head to even think about it. The parking lot at my departure stop was more or less a sheet of ice, and nothing had been done about it. No salting, no dirt-spreading, no plowing, no shoveling, nada. The actual platform was slightly better, although at the westernmost end which gets the most exposure to the elements I could see a couple of workers trying to chop up the frozen coating with what looked like cheap aluminum snow-shovels. Not, you know, actual ice-breakers or anything. Just whatever they had lying around. Once again the three things that sum up Metro are these:

- Metro keeps raising their rates
- Metro is perpetually operating in the red
- Metro spends all of its money on things which are impossible for the human mind to detect, and none on things like equipment and maintenance

I guess it’s a bad sign that I’m already capable of such black-heartedness coming off of an unplanned extra-long weekend, especially considering that that’s it for a while, with no more federal holidays for the next few months and an ever-growing need to save my precious few hours of leave for this spring’s baby-time. But I gots to call ‘em like I sees ‘em.