Yesterday, Wednesday, February 15th was the first day since I moved that everything went off without a hitch. I want to mark this occasion.

For some background, I can walk to the subway station if I need to, but a bus comes by my street twice about every hour. Before, I had often missed this bus (both to and from the station.) Well, “missed” meaning I got confused at the schedules and route numbers and stops and… ugh. To not go into it too much, Boston is a major city, and its public transportation is complicated. In fact, on Tuesday I took the wrong bus and ended up wasting two whole hours as I sat waiting for it to take me back to where I got on (actually though, it did drop my off at my street! After it had returned to the station.)

But not today. Today I sorted everything out. I made sure of it. I waited about 10 minutes and caught the bus to the station, then got on an inbound subway train. The subway is actually easy. Right at my station, it branches into Braintree and Ashmont. However, I don’t have to worry about that. So I can ride both Braintree and Ashmont subway trains, which means I never have to wait more than ten minutes to get a train to and from work. Often I have to wait less than five.

Then I got to work. On the previous two days I had been doing actual, you know, “work.” That is, HTML and programming stuff. And I think I moved quicker than they were expecting, but in any case, today I solved some bugs and made the feature I had been working on more robust. We tested it for a bit, then I committed it and marked it as complete. My first task, done! Onto the next one.

Guess what? I knocked that one out before I left too! Well, sort of. It needs to be tested and I’m not ecstatic about its implementation, but it works. The functionality is there and it works exactly as expected (it was more of a bug fix than anything — the bug didn’t break anything, but made doing something harder on the user.) So yeah, I was riding pretty darn high. Since I made a habit of mentioning lunch, me and three others got some Thai vegetarian take-out. I got a mango salad, it was good and sweet but also sort of tasted like grass… Kinda odd.

So then it comes time to leave work, and I’ve been dreading it since the buses home have consistently given me trouble. Before then, I had only rode on one bus that took me home — and even then, I got off a stop before I was supposed to! As mentioned, before, I had either gotten on the wrong one (just one time) or just walked home (which is about 15 minutes and involves crossing several busy streets in the dark and cold.) It’s easier in the morning, just get on the bus going past the street towards the station. But the evening buses are a little harder, I had to research and deduce which would bring me home. It also doesn’t help that I’m pretty sure the buses make a habit of being five minutes earlier than their schedules online say they’ll be, but I’ve been making a habit of leaving five minutes earlier for that exact reason.

Anyways, I leave work. And I remember that I have to buy a train ticket back to Connecticut for Friday, which kinda makes me nervous since I didn’t plan buying the ticket into my get-home schedule. So I hustle there and buy the ticket, then rush downstairs to where the outbound subway trains come. I get off the last step as the train pulls to a stop and opens its doors. Phew, made it.

It’s 5:54, which means I have 16 minutes to get to my bus at 6:10. Well, 11 minutes, since you know, five minutes early and all that. I don’t sweat it though, there’s only three short stops until my station, JFK/UMass. I get off and it’s 6:02, leaving me three minutes to get to the bus, which is actually sort of a trek. But I get there, the bus comes, I sit down and check my watch. 6:05. No kidding?

Four minutes later I’m at the entrance to the area my apartment building is in. I remember to attempt to find the laundry card refill machine, since I attempted to fill it Tuesday but the one I had previously seen was broken (which just added to the horribleness of that night.) But I do find the second machine, and it does work. I arrive at my apartment, make dinner, watch TV, do laundry, and finally play some Monster Hunter (which I only did once since I’ve moved, and I’ve been meaning to play more.)

Overall, a pretty awesome day. It’s sort of odd that I call what would be to most people here a normal day “awesome,” but hey, I’ll take it! I think I’m finally finding a good routine here in Boston.
-Andrew

PS- The writing style in this post is quite interesting to contrast to my other one; this one uses a style like I used for my very early blog posts. Just read the quote at the end of the other post, it’s definitely similar. I like playing with styles like this.

Edit- This is my blog’s 151st post! Remember how excited I was when I passed 100? Wait, that was exactly two years ago?! Seems like yesterday! As for comments, there are now 260! Wow! That’s over double the amount when I made that last post! I am simply in awe. Thank you, everyone, for joining me on my journey. I would not have made it so far without all of you.