Drivers

There was one good thing about the trip home in last night's bitter weather. When I have a late class, as I do MW this semester, I take the #17 to the downtown station, and then have about a ten-minute wait for the #19, which takes me the rest of the way. Last night, after I walked to the #19 bay, I heard someone call, "Hey, professor!" It was the driver of the #7, whose bay is adjacent. As I walked over, I recognized him; he used to drive the #19, and there were many evenings when I was his only passenger. He's the talkative sort of driver, so he knows me. He said that I could wait aboard his bus, in the warm, until my bus came. I accepted the offer happily.

(This isn't uncommon; I've gotten similar offers from other drivers in bad weather.)

(The nasty part of the trip home came after I got off the #19. It's three or four blocks from the stop to my house, and... well, the walk was unpleasant. I'll say no more about that.)

Pictures

I may have mentioned that I have a large collection of backgrounds, and my monitors cycle through them at six-hour intervals. I have a lot of Astronomy Picture of the Day screens, a bunch of screens from one or another webcomic, a few TV-oriented screens (mostly from Buffy or Angel), and most recently a variety of famous paintings.

A few days ago my computer had another episode of catatonia. When I rebooted, Windows Media Player had once again forgotten all of my music - it had somehow recovered a while ago, but it's gone again - and my monitors were stuck on two backgrounds, randomly choosing one or the other every six hours. (One was a picture of the recent solar eclipse, in the background of a pagoda; the other was a closeup of Jupiter.)

I finally did... something, I don't know what, that kicked the display out of that loop, and I've got "The Blue Guitar" and an Angel screen up now. We'll see if this is back to normal, or just another tight loop.

:is hopeful: