It was a sad day around the office today. We’re moving to a new location and leaving our current digs behind. Not that I had the greatest office in the world (a stark, windowless room that was generally either freezing cold or too damnhot – usually too damn hot). But it was in a suburban office park with plenty of free parking and easy lunchtime or after work access to places like Home Depot, Trader Joe’s, Wegmans, Harbor Freight – you name it, we got it out here – we are moving to a downtown location with not much around it other than expensive restaurants, congested streets (by our standards anyway) and urban blight. Not to mention having to pay to park. And while I shared my office with a couple other guys (one who was rarely there, so mostly just the two of us), it at least wasn’t a cube farm, which is where I’m heading to. Yup. Dilbert World. It’s not something any of us are looking forward to, that’s for sure. I’ll now have to take a day off to visit my dentist, who is roughly a minute away from where I work now, or to get my free Toyota Care, which is roughly five minutes from where I am now. It’s all rather depressing. On the bright side, the movers were there early so I packed up and was out of the office before noon (though I’m on-call, so I’m never really away from work).

I’ve decided that, rather than pay to park, I’m going to avail myself of public transportation. I’ve wanted to do that for a while now (you know, make myself feel like I’m doing my part for climate change and all that), but it’s just too complicated and time consuming to get from my house on the western fringes to out where we were in the eastern ‘burbs. Now, though, it’ll be a one-bus trip to downtown Syracuse. There’s public parking down in the village, and the bus stop is nearby (at THE traffic light). So I’ll go from putting 40 or so miles a day on my car to about 4). Although it’s gonna be a bit of a transition for me (haven’t bussed around in probably 30 years, back when my ’76 Chevette spent more time sitting than running), I’m looking forward to letting somebody else deal with the traffic and school buses and snow.

My bus passes are all ready to go (I was kinda of bummed to learn that rather than getting a metro-type card that I can just refill, I have to keep ordering 10-trip passes. How stupid is that?), and I figure it’ll cost me just slightly more to ride the bus than the price of gas (and that’s only because gas prices have gone down so much – $1.89 last week at Costco. Once it goes back up again, I should start saving money). And that’s before the cost of parking.

As it happens, I’m taking next week off (for one thing, I have a dentist appointment on Monday morning – whoopdie-doo) so I won’t be hitting the bus for little while yet.