Our honored website LET ME IN!!! At least, it appears to have done so. Haven’t tried to hit “Publish” yet.
Mwa ha ha! That’ll be the acid test, I reckon. Or the beer test. Or something.
Gray and rainy out there: really a gloomy day! But here in Arizona, we don’t bellyache about rain. We’re thrilled out of our hot little minds to see water falling out of the sky.
At any rate: good thing I darted out the door this morning, en route to grocery stores and the like! Got there and back before the skies clabbered up. The spavined hip is fast getting better: hardly hurt at all to walk up to the store. In another day or so, I imagine, the pain will be about gone.
Meanwhile, I’m finding that having an Uber driver live right across the street from me(!) is JUST THE BUSINESS. Seriously, having this guy and his colleagues in the offing will keep me on the road to all the destinations I’m used to visiting, and probably will rescue me totally from the busses and the streetcars. The Uber guys’ vehicles are clean and seem to be well maintained. And they show up forthwith, whenever you express a desire for a ride. Better than London taxicabs, even!!
My plan now is to hire these folks more often and maybe to have little gifts on hand for them. Tips, of course, are in order. But some other small lagniappe also will help to ingratiate them, over time.
Y’know…when we lived in London, we never kept or rented our own vehicle. Same was true during the entire ten years we lived in Saudi Arabia. We never owned a car! Wherever we went, we got there by cab or bus.
Soon enough, experience will tell us whether hiring a 21st-century American cabbie will do the same for us. Sincerely it is to be hoped: with any luck, most people will never need to own a car. Or want one!
Well. Hmmm…. You might want or need one if you have to ride someplace every goddam day. Going to work, for example.
But maybe not. When we lived in San Francisco, I rode the city bus to school every day. And as a practical matter, it was easier and faster than putting up my mother to hauling the car out of the garage and driving me up to the campus. My father went to sea, of course, so the home-to-work commute was moot. But my aunt, who lived in Berkeley, commuted by train five and six days a week to her job at the Crocker-Anglo National Bank, in downtown San Francisco. And she never owned a car. Or expressed any interest in having one. If they needed to go to a doctor or some such, they called a cab.
So…I’m thinking my son’s car-snatching caper may be one of the biggest favors he’s done for me in a long time. Imagine the amount of money I will NOT have to diddle away if I don’t have a car to diddle it away on!
Seriously: no gasoline, no maintenance, no parking charges, no repairs… Geez!
Meanwhile…heh! Contradictorily enough, today probably would not be the best of all possible days for public-transit commuting. It’s been raining all day. Not hard: just drizzle drizzle drizzle: endlessly soggy.
But it used to be like this in San Francisco about half the time…and it never bothered me. This is why you have a thing called an umbrella. And a raincoat. 😀
