Ordinary Day

Those of you who follow me on Facebook and/or Twitter saw me live-tweeting this last night, but for those of you who follow me from the blog or LJ or DW, here’s the epic saga of Anna’s Worst Commute Ever!

My previous commute record was set back in 2006, roughly three and a half hours between solarbird calling me and my finally making home to MurkNorth. This beat that. Hands down.

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Mirrored from annathepiper.org.

Today I realized that not only were we in for some snow, but that we were also in for a Seahawks game in Seattle tonight. Between that and how my beloved solarbird called me around 4pm to tell me that the snow had hit Lake Forest Park, and that as she walked up the hill to our house it was snowing so hard she had to dig the snow out of her pockets, I thought, "OKAY THEN" and decided I'd better scram for home while I still could.

spazzkat actually left slightly before I did because he wanted to stop at Whole Foods and get some salad on the way home. Turns out I got onto a bus before he did, though. I caught the 308 coming out of downtown around 4:30, just as it was getting really interestingly dark and streaky-looking north of Lake Union. As we hit I-5, we started driving into it. By the time we passed the U-district it was coming down with incredible thickness and speed, like unto which I have not seen for quite some time.

I called Dara around a quarter to five to tell her we were crawling along I-5 and that I might be a while. An hour later we'd made it to 145th finally, but we had to inch along at a crawl because all kinds of vehicles had spun out all over the place on that road. Eventually even the bus got stuck, around 25th and 145th, and everybody had to get off and hoof it.

Which meant that I had to walk all the way to Lake City Way and then turn north to head for Lake Forest Park. The thought of making it to Starbuck's for a sandwich and a hot chocolate kept me going, and finally around 6:45 or so I made it there.

Got some kitty litter at Albertson's, snarfed down the sandwich, and finally trudged up the hill to make it home around 7:20. Dara, Paul, and risu handed me hot chocolate about the instant I walked in. I am very glad to be home.

So last night, I promised solarbird I would leave the car at home today so that she could take it to get its oil changed, on the theory that it would be easier to do this since I have to, y'know, like, WORK. And I didn't know how long it would take me to get the oil for the car changed. I figured it'd be less complicated for me to just leave the car at home and take the bus in.

FOOLISH MORTAL!

I went up onto Metro's web site last night to try to figure out the best bus route to get from our place over to my workplace, and was presented with a couple of different options. One of them involved a two-bus scenario, with one of the busses being the one that goes right by our house. That sounded like a good idea. OR SO I THOUGHT.

Got up again this morning to confirm the route and figure out where the heck I needed to change busses. Realized, while waiting for the bus that goes past our house, that there were in fact two varieties of this bus, an express and a non-express, and I didn't know which one to take. So I asked the first driver that came by whether her express bus went to Yesler. She said no. I figured this meant okay, I needed to take the non-express version of the bus. So I got on that one.

And did not realize that this bus did not go where I needed it to go until it got to the Seattle Center and the driver told me to get off.

I wound up waffling between calling Dar for a ride and trying to find another way to work. I wound up opting for catching the monorail over to the Metro tunnels in the hopes of finding a bus that would take me across the lake, since I knew Dar had to, well, TAKE THE CAR FOR AN OIL CHANGE. So I did this, forking out another buck-fifty for the monorail on top of the two-buck bus fare I'd already paid.

Found a bus that went across the lake, though it only took me to the South Bellevue Park 'n' Ride and I needed to get to the Eastgate one a little farther west. So I got off at the South Bellevue Park 'n' Ride, and waited for the third bus.

Which came by in due course and took a nice loopy route IN THE OTHER DIRECTION, with me looking plaintively out the window and thinking 'SO CLOSE YET SO FAR' until the stupid thing finally turned around and came over to the place I wanted to go.

Caught the first bus at 8:30ish. 20 minutes to 11, I finally got to work.

Stupid busses. :P