June 12, 1997
Dear Everyone:
Happy
Father’s Day to
all you Dad People out there in Everyone-Land!
I have more or less decided that the time has come
to look into moving to a new home somewhat closer to where I work.
When I worked in
San Francisco
that was clearly not an option.
But now that I work full time in “Livermore” it’s time to think
about it.
It’s about 28 miles from my place to “Livermore”,
yet it takes me an hour to get there in the morning and often over an
hour to get home. It’s a
little better right now because the summer traffic pattern has settled
into place. The traffic is
lighter because, on any given day, a certain percentage of the drivers
are off on vacation.
But I still take the Rudgear Road Bailout every
evening, avoiding the freeway interchange by driving through some lovely
old “Alamo” neighborhoods.
Of course, the denizens of lovely old “Alamo” don’t like us peasants
from “Pleasant Hill” driving through their neighborhoods, so they’ve
passed local “no peasants” ordinances prohibiting turning onto the main
drag during commute hours.
However, we wily peasants can find ways around that, as witness the
number of No U Turn signs on the side streets on the other side of the
main drag. “Ve have vays of
getting through ‘Alamo’.”
Nevertheless, that’s about two hours per day that I
might be able to spend on something else if I wasn’t stuck in the car
the whole time. Such as
sleeping. I get up pretty
darned early in order to get to work on time.
And I’m one person who firmly believes that the greatest
technological advance of the Twentieth Century is the
Snooze Button.
Now you could argue that, since we have
Flex Time, I could
elect to start work later, thus allowing me to sleep later.
But there’s a
Catch 22:
The later you start out, the longer it takes you to get to where
you’re going. Just ten
minutes makes quite a difference in the amount of time you actually
spend on the road.
As
Benjamin
Franklin said: “Early to
bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.”
(Rejoinder: “Early to
rise and early to bed, makes a man healthy, wealthy and dead.”
--Unknown.)
There are even people at “Livermore” who start work
at 6:00 am specifically to avoid the worst of the traffic.
Of course, I consider this conduct above and beyond the call of
duty, but they’re young so what do they know?
For one thing, getting up early means going to bed early and a
lot of things I like to watch start after 9:00 (like most adult fare).
The solution?
I
tape anything that starts after 9:00 and “watch” it the next morning
while I’m getting ready for work.
I discovered that all the little chores I go through to make
myself presentable to the world take almost exactly the same amount of
time as an average one-hour prime time show, minus the commercial
breaks.
Of course there can be drawbacks.
You might miss an important scene while brushing your teeth.
But the worst is when something sad happens during the final act.
“No, no! The little
boy’s puppy can’t die now--I’m in the middle of applying
mascara!”
Another reason for moving, apart from the time I
could save, is that a family of
Troglodytes has
recently moved into the apartment above mine.
The little Troglodyte Junior is fond of jumping from the stairs
(the unit above is a two-story townhouse) onto their living room floor,
which happens to be my bedroom ceiling.
That’s only one means they’ve found to make extremely loud
noises, loud enough to make my fixtures rattle.
I can’t even imagine how they make some of their noises, nor do I
want to.
And they’re very careless about letting things fall
over the balcony rail onto my patio below.
In the past few months I’ve found toys, pens, cigarette butts,
Band-Aids, bath towels and satin shorts (I don’t even want to
think about that one) on my
patio floor. All of which
I’ve delivered back to their front doorstep.
So now I’m contemplating the joys of house-hunting
and selling. Cleaning the
entire condo (two days minimum) and keeping it clean (a second job).
Strangers tromping through my place when I’m not there.
Dealing with
real estate
agents (no offense).
Finding the right place at the right price and then looking for
financing. And moving,
something that is so much fun
that I put it at the top of my list of Favorite Things, right next to
getting another
root canal.
And then I start to think that maybe staying where I am wouldn’t
be so bad.
Until the next time the Troglodytes start tossing
furniture around, or I’m crawling along the freeway behind some big, fat
Ford Explorer at 2.1428571 miles per hour.
Watch this space for further late-breaking news.
OK, OK, movies...
Saw “Stalkers ‘R’ Us” this weekend because
“Jeannie” flatly refused to go see
Con Air
as one review she’d read gave it an “F”.
Actually the movie is called
Addicted
to Love and it stars
Matthew
Broderick and Meg
Ryan. He’s trying to
retrieve a girlfriend who dumped him for a Frenchman.
She’s trying to get even with the Frenchman for dumping her in
favor of the new girl.
There are parts that are unexpectedly hilarious, but then there are parts that they obviously thought should be hilarious that just aren’t. Broderick’s character only wants to get his girl back. Ryan just wants her guy to die in agony. You know what they say about “a woman scorned”.**
All things being equal, we might have done better
to go watch
Nicholas Cage jump around in tight jeans.
Love, as always,
Pete