eruthros

Query: what happens when a babelfish eats an ear worm?

I had "Something's Coming" (from West Side Story, which I haven't seen since I was about twelve, so this is totally unfair) stuck in my head, and when m_shell and I started joking about babelfish and ear worms, I promptly started attempting it in Spanish, though I can't really decide what to use for "cannonballing."

***

Today I was nearly run over in a crosswalk by a left-turner in a 1970s black muscle car, who a) didn't have the right of way b) was making an illegal left turn anyway and c) speeded up instead of slowing down. In process of hustling out of his way to avoid getting hit by a fast-moving vehicle, I tripped on the curb and fell. At which point the left-turning bastard paused (then he paused) and started honking his horn, pointing, and laughing. As did his passengers. So. Bitter. Wah. Now my thumb and shoulder hurt from being jammed, and of course I thumped my knee but good.

***

Tomorrow I am making these cupcakes for a party. Except only the lemon curd -- much as I would love to do the lime and grapefruit, Whole Foods lacked organic lime and was charging a ridiculous $3 per grapefruit. Oy.

I leapt out of bed this morning to check the news, and saw... yes, two of the most-feared words of the city dweller:

Transit. Strike.

Yep, that's right. Philadelphia, a city already hemorrhaging money, gets to have its second transit strike since 1998. And the last one lasted forty days, so we don't anticipate swift resolution. No buses, no subway, no trolleys. The train is still running (different union), but crowded and behind-schedule and it only serves a minuscule number of commuters.

And, of course, the talk about it is all a mess. There's a lot of union-bashing, a lot of derogatory personal comments, and a lot of accusations. Completely understandable, since 1/3 of Philadelphia households have no cars. But it's still worrying to hear people say "What're the SEPTA drivers complaining about? 5% of their health care? That's nothing! I pay for health care so they should have to, too! Welcome to the 21st century, punks!" I mean, should this really be a thing we accept? Should we hate people who don't pay into their own premiums?

And, of course, the management claims the workers are making ridiculous claims, and the workers claim the management is overpaid, and both of those things are probably technically true, given that SEPTA's been running a deficit for seven years. But it seems to me that there's a bigger problem -- SEPTA's a public service. Second most expensive public transit fares in the nation and still running a deficit and dirty stations and trains that run once an hour? There's a problem there above and beyond the union (which, fyi, is either 13th or the 17th in terms of pay, so again, second most expensive fares and where is that money going?). I mean. It's a mess in so many ways that blaming the union by itself hardly seems fair. Sure, they're picketing in part to protect people from being fired for talking on their cell phones while driving (arrrgh!), but let's blame the state legislature (no dedicated funding!) and the organizers (routes that make no sense!) and the city (where to start?) as well.

All this speculating is largely to distract me from the unlovely fact that I have no driver's license and suddenly can't get to my suburban classes and can't take the trolley back from Trader's Joes and get to walk an extra mile or so to shop at Whole Foods and can't get to the co-op at all. Whee?

Tonight we have to go pick up the CSA and see Girlyman at the World Cafe. In a perfect world, these two things would fit together perfectly; from where I'm sitting, though, it looks like they're going to be two separate trips.

On the other hand, the CSA will have rhubarb this week, and we have organic concentrated orange juice, which means I can make the rhubarb pie I love. Basically no added sugar, just the juice, and it comes out thick and pink and so tart you practically have to eat it with ice cream, unless you're having it for breakfast. Mmmmmm.

We still haven't eaten all the greens from last week, either. We have a whole bag of bitter greens left, despite best efforts AND the baking of a quiche. (As we get more interesting food, my lj gets foodier.)

Also, we have here my contribution to the Glorious 25th of May iconage. I can read the text on m_shell's laptop, but it may not be as readable on macs -- let me know so I can fiddle. (If you want it, you can take it, but please credit.)

The icon is currently reminding me that by the first weekend of June I'll be reading Thud. Wheeeeee!

It is now February, thank heavens. In that spirit, I shall post something Fun and Upbeat and other Capital Letterified Things As Well.

So. In the spirit of February yet to come, which will hopefully be a much better month than January, I present Things I Like About Philadelphia.

Reading Terminal Market. So much hustle! So much bustle! So many fine prepared foodstuffs and custom ice-cream and unpasteurized root beer and ravioli with weird things in!
- Warm pretzels from Fisher's. Fisher's is the Amish pretzel stand, and they spin the pretzels right there with that special practiced flip, and you can sit on bar stools and eat your warm disgusting-in-concept-but-oh-so-nummy-in-practice salted pretzel painted with melted butter and watch the production.
- The Amish juice stand, home of many fine juices and also of half-gallon jugs of heavy cream. Half. Gallon. Word.

My complete and utter inability to get out of or into Suburban Station, which is frustrating if I'm in a hurry, but really hilarious on reflection. See, it's perpetually under construction, so you come up out of the train tunnels and (if there aren't any commuters to follow) look for a door. And you don't see one. And you think "well, I want to go north, but I don't see a door there -- hey, there's a sign for JFK and 16th! That's sort of the direction I want to go!" and you follow signage but it turns out the first set of stairs is in fact closed on alternate Tuesdays and also after the hour of 10 pm, and then you continue on through endless shops looking for another stairwell, but it's closed because of snow, and then you continue on and finally, finally find an open stairwell -- four blocks in the wrong direction. Getting in is, as you can imagine, quite interesting as well, and never works the same way twice. Fairly often I end up going in the front door of hotels and then ducking through what appear to be back stairwells for the laundry service and then around corners and then suddenly hey! there's a train!

Longwood Gardens. Oh, Italian Water Garden, how do I love thy frogish sculpture. Fountains! And hills! And a tower like Rapunzel's! And great stretches of crocuses! And a winter show with giant Christmas trees! So lovely.

The Kelly Drive multi-use path between here and downtown. It runs along the Schuylkill River, and is blessedly free of cross-traffic. And is really, really pretty, and a lovely five mile walk, all rambly and full of picnic benches and gazebos and random sculpture and boathouse row.
- The Philadelphia Museum of Art, which graces the end of the Kelly Drive path, and is one of very few museums left in the country to still do a pay-what-you-want day every week. Also, it is lovely and yellowish-gold and perches on top of a hill and dominates the landscape, as a good museum should. Also it, you know, has art. And a cloister. Whee! If I were in school right now, I'd be studying in that indoor cloister with fountain all the friggin' time, man.
- The Fairmount Water Works, at the foot of the Museum of Art. The museum's actually designed to match the water works, and they are tres gorgeous, and also with an artificial waterfall which was the largest of its kind at the time. Many pictures are taken by all.

Art. Really. Many Philadelphians don't seem to appreciate it, but I do -- there's public art all over the place here. Turn a corner, any corner, and discover random statuary! Or a mural!
- The Commie Propaganda-Style multi-plaza art along Kelly Drive. It has some technical name, but really mine's better. Because it's all "the farmer: they toiled for us." With big heads and big hands and sometimes sickles. Yes.
- The random house in the ghetto with a giant painting of Charlie Parker and the legend "Charlie Parker Appreciate Society."
- Fairies on sticks in the Kelly Drive area. The actual sculpture of the fairies is sixty feet in the air, supported by very tall columns.
- Goethe! Because apparently Goethe was very important to the city of Philadelphia. Yes. He's in the arboretum, posed with book in one of those positions you only get with sculpture (there's a handy tree stump to support his coat). Hee.
- Shiny murals. They do whole sides of houses as mosaics with mirrors as one of the components. Mmmm, sparkly.
- The buffalo in the fountain in the Eakins Oval.
- William Penn standing on top of City Hall, looking down on the incredibly bad traffic in the circle around City Hall. Especially because I just learned that the original architects wanted him on top of the dome, and everyone agreed, and they made the statue, and only later realized that they had no way to get it up there once the dome was built, so they put it in the basement until someone invented a large enough crane. Poor William Penn.

Commuter trains with actual conductors! They punch tickets and shout out stops and wear funny hats.

Turning a corner, any corner, and discovering a church with interesting architecture. (Notice I said interesting. Some of them are lovely, especially the gothic-style ones like Saint Bridgett's, but some of them are... whoa. Who knew you could fit so much gingerbread on the slate tiles on the roof?)

The Free Library of Philadelphia. Especially that it was so early on the free-library trend that it's in the name, so every understands it's not a Gentleman's Library. It have a lovely large building with much random carving and big front steps. And many books, which is the best part.
- The faded signs in the basement of the Free Library main building that have the radiation symbol on them and say "bomb shelter." Snerk.
- The Friends of the Free Library bookstore, Bookcorner, one of the most fabulous library bookstores I ever did see. Open daily. And big. And many, many books. And sales. And old, old books. That's where we got our fabulous psychological treatise on the mental illness "lesbianism," dated 1950.

The view when you turn the corner from Arch onto Benjamin Franklin Parkway -- all the way up the Parkway to the museum, over several fountains along the way.

And that's all I've got room for tonight, folks. So thanks, and I'll see you tomorrow! May your Februarys be infinitely better than your Januarys.

I had one of those mornings that makes you feel vaguely as though you should buy a lottery ticket on the way home.

I seem to have turned off the loud alarm in my sleep, see, and so I woke up thirty-five minutes late. (Admittedly, this probably only means I got up twenty-some minutes late, as I'm horrible at getting out of bed in the morning.) And I was panicked and worried I'd miss my bus and generally going "ahhh."

And yet somehow... it worked out. I got out of the house on time and even managed to have breakfast, shower, wash my hair, and find clothes that match (one of the above usually gets skipped if I'm running late). I even had time to check the weather online, skim my friends page, and read copperbadge's new short. Score!

Then I got to the bus stop right on time, only to have the driver on a different bus route stick his head out the door and inform us that all the buses that came down the expressway were delayed 10-15 minutes. Score! See, I was half-asleep and only had two dollars, and that's enough for lunch, but Philadelphia is much less of a cashless economy than SC or the Bay Area, so I don't feel comfortable without at least a little cash. So I had time to dart to the ATM, get some cash, and stop at the cafe for a blended mocha to wake me up AND combat the heat. And also I sorta forgot to drink anything with breakfast. And I darted back to the bus stop ... and only had to wait a minute for my bus. Score!

The bus driver told me that that his was probably the last bus to come on the route for the next two hours -- a gauge broke in the Queen Lane Reservoir, and a tremendously wet mudslide was now blocking all but one lane of traffic on the Expressway. (They still haven't cleaned it up --it's so wet it's making life very hard for them.) He'd just barely made it out of the gridlock, so he was a mere 10 minutes late, and the buses behind him would probably be delayed an hour. So I was damn glad I made it onto that bus despite waking up so late. Score!

And then I got off the bus right next to a pair of really mellow bushbunnies chomping on the grass underneath a bush. Absolutely adorable, of course, since bushbunnies are barely a handspan across, with really active ears. Bushbunnies make any day better. *g*

And just as I got to the office, I remembered that my boss AND my boss's boss are in Europe for a conference ... for the rest of the week and next week. Score!

So all in all, I'm in remarkably good mood for a day that started with thirty seconds of total panic. Everything just seemed to work out. Aren't days like that wonderful?