New Transit

Today I took Metro Micro, a shared on-demand ride service that will take you around North Hollywood and Burbank for a dollar. It's like the Super Shuttle only not as annoying and you don't have to load up everyone's luggage. I had a code so Metro Micro was free today, and it takes TAP cards too. I just booked it on my phone using the Metro Micro app, which told me to go to a corner near the NoHo metro, where a driver picked me up in a sleek air conditioned van with seatbelts and wifi. We picked up one other passenger along Magnolia, and I was dropped off across the street from my destination in Burbank (the hardware store).

I hadn't taken it before because every time I'd tried to book it, the wait had been 20 minutes, and I keep forgetting to plan ahead so I usually just walk or take a bus. Or a scooter that one time. But this time the van arrived in 4 minutes, which is good because the bus that goes along this route wasn't due for 40 minutes.

Metro Micro is awesome, and a lot safer than the electric scooter I tried a few weeks ago. 

Observation

You know I have a high threshold for this sort of thing, but it really is shocking how filthy the LA metro has become over the pandemic.

Guess I Should Do Something About This, Then

The Contemporary Austin has a Daniel Johnston exhibit going on, and it's supposed to be massive and excellent, so looks like I have to find some weekend to go to Austin.

There are plenty of pieces there I've never known about or seen. I wonder which of them he meant to send to me along with this note which is part of the display.

(He spelled my name right sometimes and wrong sometimes, but he consistently said my last name wrong.)

Monday Night Studio

I went to wheel class in Burbank tonight--first time back on the wheel since the pandemic started. (I did hand-building in NYC, and Burbank pottery class shut down along with everything else in March, 2020.)

The wheel is fun, and I didn't break anything. Started out kinda simple just to see if I can still do it.

One thing you may not know is there's a lot of splattered mud when you use a potter's wheel.

I was wearing sandals and now I have feet of clay.

How It Started

I came across this photo while searching for something...this is what launched the Jersey City backyard watering hole.

During the early days of the pandemic, when everything was closed, the kids upstairs in my JC house had their kiddie pool on the patio in the yard. And we found this image on the game cam.

Remember These?

I worked in my actual office today (photo from before I moved those boxes) and now I'm exhausted.

Which makes no sense, since I do this job every day, and the walk is short, maybe half a mile.

But here I am, tired.

They Did

 Ha! We were at a wedding in Thousand Oaks. 

The Irony

When I went to my office, I found this note from a departed* colleague, left the day she'd collected her personal items.

(This is the same person who was game to spring me out of the routine colonoscopy in March, 2020 by pretending one of us had a car. She's a good egg and a sly smart-ass.)

*edited to add: as in resigned.

A Twist

Thursday night. September 2, 2021.

Eighteen months into the pandemic, my inner compass feels cut on the bias, the hem rippled, disoriented from the ache of uncertainty. Our global systems have the potential for authentic evolution or disaster in the face of climate change and public health upheaval.

The unknown future rolls toward us.

I left the Toluca Lake bar early on Thursday night. The outdoor area where the vaccinated felt comfortable enough to de-mask with friends, many seeing each other outside of a video call for the first time since our offices closed on March 13, 2020. And possibly the last time. This was a celebration and a wake…we congratulated those who’d recently resigned to move to new employers, alongside raising a glass to the past as old routines disintegrated without the illusion of normality. We’d lost plenty of people over the last 18 months, but each time we’d rallied. We’d pulled off a record year, each team losing sleep and ignoring the simmering potential for cultural collapse as we threw ourselves into the joy of fiction.

Risky Business

I rode an electric scooter for the first time today. I wasn’t great at it but I got where I needed to go. I probably looked kinda dorky which was fine until I heard a friend yell “Marie!”

Maybe I should’ve denied it was me.

Solutions or Luck?

I was extraordinarily lucky during Ida. People drowned, cars floated, homes were destroyed, possessions soaked. Raw sewage overflowed into basements.

The cellar in the row house adjacent to mine in Jersey City flooded. Nearby intersections had a foot of water or more.

The key to my house pulling through was the power staying on. I tossed and turned all night here in Burbank, worried because my little apartment back East is on the ground floor, and because I know the basement flooded during Sandy. The power had gone out in 2012, the generator had gone offline, the sump pump stopped working, and the water had overwhelmed everything. Four feet of water had to be pumped out of the basement, according to the previous owner's Twitter I read when I was stalking the house prior to purchase.

Insomnia

Here I am out west, doomscrolling through videos of the flooding in Jersey City and I'm hoping to hell the sump pump in my Lafayette basement holds out, and that the water at street level didn't overwhelm the drainage and end up in my ground-level apartment.

Much of the city is overwhelmed with flooding. Places far above sea level, places prone to flooding, places not prone to flooding. Everything.

(The wild animals should be fine--they go in the nun's garage. I'm not so sure about my basement or ground-floor apartment.)

Time Change

I'm in Burbank, and I have to admit working 9-6 feels so much less burdensome than working noon-9 pm.

Last Glimpse for Now

Last look until New York Comic Con!

Please don't worry about the animals while I'm gone. They don't actually need me because 1) they're wild animals and 2) there is a whole family of humans on the property, not just families of raccoons, opossums, skunks, and collections of unrelated feral cats.