I had the strangest bus experience this afternoon. I was waiting for my bus, the 545, when another bus drove up. This bus had no number; it was simply marked "To Terminal". The driver asked everyone at the stop if we wanted a ride - "Nonstop to downtown, might save you a few minutes," he cheerfully told us all.

Well, downtown is where I wanted to be, so I and three other folk hopped on. Sure enough, we skipped all stops along 520. Yay! The driver whistled all the way; he was having a jolly afternoon.

None of us knew quite where he was going to drop us off until we got there. He drove us into the Convention Center transit station, down into the lower bus lanes where no pedestrians are supposed to venture. He then hopped off the bus to escort us all out of the no access area, still cheerfully whistling all the while. Some driver from another bus, amused to see riders out in a no-rider area and perhaps thinking we looked rather touristy, announced at us over his intercom, "Welcome to Seattle!"

I was happy to find that the final destination was actually closer to home than my normal afternoon stop. Two others on the bus were less enchanted, however; the Convention Center stop was apparently not where they wished to end up.

I'm still not sure what bus I was on.

The shizzle is flying. Someone at Company_B found out about Company_A's poor practice of sharing one Company_A network account among multiple active employees while they are all waiting to get their own accounts, and people on high are not happy about it. Still waiting to see where all the fallout lands.

1. Who is 'm'?
2. What's wrong with shizzle?

I dreampt about my birds again last night. I was in my childhoood bedroom. It was dark outside, and the room was dimly lit, so I didn't notice that the window was partially open. We had the birds out playing with us, but something startled them and they bolted for the window. All flew out before I could do anything about it, but as I reached frantically after them I managed to grab Cricket and pull her back in. I can still remember the feel of her chest in my hand, her quickly beating heart, her ruffled feathers.

I called for the rest of my birds, but none came back. When it got light the next day I searched the neighborhood for them, high and low, but I was never able to recover any of the others.

Everything is so backwards in my dreams. In actuality, Cricket is the one who is gone. The others still remain.

I don't know what the dream means. Maybe I'm trying to come to grips with the fact that I'll lose all of them at some point in time, and trying to come to terms with that impending loss now. But then why was Cricket alive in the dream? Why does she keep coming back?

More days than not, lately, I get to my bus stop just after my bus has left. I then have to wait a full quarter of an hour for the next bus. I guess I need to work on that whole timing thing.

On our morning walk today, Louie and I saw what looked to be a flock of pigeons eating a pile of puke. Ick. I guess you eat what you can find when you're a wild(?) animal living in the city, but still...

Netflix is awesome, by the way. I ordered my moveis in the wee hours of the morning on Tuesday, they shipped the movies during the day that same day, and the movies were in my mailbox by Wednesday afternoon. Kick ass.

Taking the bus is dangerous. I mean, I have to walk to the bus stop, a whole half mile or something. And then I roll my ankle, fall, skin my knee, and catch the attention of everyone within a full block radius. That never happened when I was driving.

"Are you okay?" yells some guy from down the hill over on the other side of the street.

"Yeah," I call back, standing to dust myself off and survey the damage. The fall wore a weak spot in the knee of my pants that will probably turn into a full-blown hole within one or two washings -- and these were nice pants, too. Bummer. My knee is a little bloodied up. My ankle hurts from rolling it. And more than anything, my pride is bruised.

Then, to make matters worse, the fall slowed me down just enough so that I missed my bus by 30 seconds. It drove past me as I was briskly walking the last block to the stop, so I had to sit and wait another 15 minutes for the next one.

I want to see The Annihilation of Fish. I was browsing Seattle CitySearch in my quest last night to remember all the recent movies I've been wanting to see so that I could put them on my netflix list, and I came across this one. I had never heard of it, but the reviews on the site raved about it. Since then, I've found any number of positive, rave reviews while searching the web. But, despite listing it under their current movies, CitySearch doesn't list any showtimes for the movie, anywhere.

Amazon knows about the movie, but doesn't have it in stock.

It's not even on Ebay.

Nobody has it in stock.

It has frigging James Earl Jones in it! Talk about big names... why can't I find it anywhere?

I found the official website. It looks like it played at all sorts of film festivals when it first came out, back in 1999 and in 2000, and then I don't know what happened to it. People saw it -- all sorts of folks talk about it on the web -- but it's not available ANYWHERE. I even tried Kazaa, and nothing there.

Bah.

Stupid limited releases.

Stupid CitySearch, what a tease.

I set up an account with netflix last night. w00t! I think I'm going to start both a book journal and a movie journal, to keep up with everything I'm reading and watching these days.

I dreamed last night that Amber moved out here, and that my brother's tour of duty ended and he came back as well. Amber, Mary, Leroy and I were all together. In the dream, I remembered having dreamed not long before that everything would happen that way. It seemed right and good and even destined.

In real life, though, my brother's tour just got extended. Up until 3 days ago, they thought they were coming home. Now they find that they are "needed someplace else" and their release date has been moved out to March. Leroy is allowed to take two weeks leave time, but because he would have to pay his own travel expenses and because he doesn't want to leave only to have to go back, he is not going to leave.

Sometimes waking up really sucks.

Mary and my father got in on Saturday. It's the first time my father has been out here since I moved to Washington.

Last night, we went dancing. Mary and I danced, and my father, my aunt, and my cousin Andy all actually came and watched for a little bit. On the one hand, it was nice that one of my parents got to see what has become a large and important part of my life. On the other hand, he didn't seem very interested or excited about it, which made me a little sad. Oh well; I guess you can't ever win all battles.

I went to a series of dance workshops this weekend. Some of the courses were better than others. There were a 20's Charleston and a Balboa course that I really liked. We learned some nifty solo-stuff in the 20's Charleston course, and it made me decide that I'd like to work some on my solo dancing. It'll give me something to do when the music moves me, but there's nobody that wants to dance with me or nobody I want to dance with.

Now I'm at work. Tired. I rode the bus again. I wanted to take a nap, but decided that wouldn't be smart; would suck to miss my stop. Now I'm sipping on a coffee I just grabbed from the kitchen, trying to gather my wits about me so that I can start getting things done.

*yawn*

Martin Sheen sent me email! Kick ass!

Well, kinda.

From: "Martin Sheen" [info @ deanforamerica.com]
To: Kathryn [kkrueger @ exmsft.com]
Subject: A special message from Martin Sheen
Date: Fri, 26 Sep 2003 18:31:10 -0400

Dear Kathryn,

I am writing you today as a fellow supporter of Howard Dean. It is now more important than ever that we stand up with him.

At yesterday's presidential debate in New York City, the Washington candidates continued their relentless attacks on Howard Dean. For the past month, the establishment candidates have been conducting orchestrated assaults on Dean's character, employing radio ads, speeches, direct mail, and a whisper campaign questioning the Governor's commitment to key Democratic values -- one of them has even created a website devoted exclusively to criticizing Howard Dean.

As Howard Dean said at the debate, "We need to remember that the enemy here is George Bush, not each other."

We need Howard Dean's bold leadership in the White House. Strong fundraising keeps our campaign's momentum going; it pays for much-needed media buys in key battleground states and it attracts new supporters to Howard Dean. And continuing strong fundraising will also help with the campaign's latest bold move: hiring a coordinator for each of Iowa's 99 counties.

There are five days left before the FEC filing deadline. I urge you to make a contribution now to help Governor Dean:

http://www.deanforamerica.com/contributetoday

I know that you have done a great deal to get Howard Dean to where he is today. But today and for the next five days the most important thing he needs is your financial support. Please join more than 150,000 Americans who have already contributed:

http://www.deanforamerica.com/contributetoday

Thank you for taking the time today to support Howard Dean.

Sincerely,
Martin Sheen

I guess he likes Dean too. Yay for Dean. Yay for Martin Sheen, the would-be-Canadian Dean-supporter best-ever-fictional-president (West Wing kicks ass!) who sent me email.

I finally rode the bus to work today!

Granted, Steve rode it also, and even walked with me to the bus stop, so it was significantly less scary.

That said, I still feel pretty proud of myself. Yay Kathryn! Way to conquer your fears.

I want to go home from work. But I'm waiting to start off a database restoration job. But I can't start it until I finish copying the database backup file over to my server, and that copy job has been going for 20 minutes already. It says "4 minutes remaining", but 10 minutes ago it said "7 minutes remaining". I don't think it knows what it's talking about.

I hate super-large files.

I hate waiting.

Oh well. Been looking at the Seattle Traffic Cameras and it looks like I'd just be leaving to sit in traffic anyhow. Bah.

I also hate bills. Why can't they just pay themselves?

I mean, I guess they can, with all those new-fangled bill-paying services. But I don't trust them. I don't like when money is automatically drawn from my accounts -- that just makes it easier to miss discrepancies.

So why can't I pay bills like, once every half year? So many bills, due so often... suckasaurus.

I hate traffic.

I meant to post at least part of this thread a while back:

________________________________________
From: Oliver Scholz
Sent: Monday, September 15, 2003 5:05 PM
To: Kathryn Krueger; Susan Boling; Former CRM Employees
Subject: RE: hmaun mnid

There is a word for that:
Dyslexia
:)
I had to go to extra classes as a kid to try to fix my dyslexia.

Welcome back Kathy! Glad to see you back at the company.
________________________________________
From: Kathryn Krueger
Sent: Monday, September 15, 2003 5:01 PM
To: Susan Boling; Former CRM Employees
Subject: RE: hmaun mnid

For me, it’s not jsut readnig – my mnid dosen’t bohrer tpynig or wirting all the letetrs in the rihgt oredr etiher. I’m alwyas misytpnig whree all the corerct ltteers are icnluedd, but not in the rgiht odrer. It eevn hapepns wehn I’m wriitng the old fasihoend way, with a pen and paepr. I don’t alawys hvae the frist and lsat lteters rgiht, thuogh – semitemos I yllatnedicca etirw sdrow sdrawkcab, os tsrif dna tsal era pilf deppolf.

________________________________________
From: Susan Boling
Sent: Monday, September 15, 2003 4:29 PM
To: Former CRM Employees
Subject: hmaun mnid

Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in
waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht
the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a total
mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the
huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a
wlohe.

Then I saw that Brian had posted something almost identical to Susan's original mail on his blog in the meanwhile. Ha. I geuss geart mnids tinhk akile.

Oliver pointed a finger at me and claimed dyslexia because I accidentally type entire words backwards sometimes. I didn't think that was the sort of way in which dyslexia manifested itself. Hmm. I'll evah to research taht a tib more sometime.

Actor and activist Martin Sheen, who portrays a fictional US president on the television drama The West Wing, said when he crosses from the US to Canada he feels like he's left "the land of the lunatics".

I'm not the only one!

New processes implemented at work. I'm much busier, but much happier. They're helping smooth things out such that it's easier to get my work done and be more productive, and they're also positively affecting the way in which my officemate and I interract. Nice to have new processes actually help, instead of just bogging things down.

Happy happy me.