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There you go CDTA, you’ll get your extra $1.30 off my Swiper Card and you can go buy yourself a coffee on this unnecessarily cold morning. I guess I knew it was going to be windy this morning but even I was surprised how much the skies were roaring when I woke up this morning.

It’s more time to read and flip through my library e-books on the bus. 📚 I got through Edward Abbey’s the Fool’s Progress but like so many of his books I felt kind of like I missed something when I reached the end, then starting listening to Porter Foxes’ Northland as I walked laps last night at the Empire Plaza. There was a bum sleeping in the breezeway between the doors at shuttle entrance in the afternoon 👹 but no homeless people yelled at me while I walked and no winos at Capitol bus stop. 🚏Yes, I get home about a half hour later now that Express Bus is no more, but I kind of like walking indoors on these cold days compared to my evening walk, even if it means getting harassed by the bums that have taken over Plaza. And it kind of sucks that they’ve removed the benches throughout the Concourse, unless of course you go past security and go to Capitol, though it’s not like I am going to sit down at my time to walk. 👣 I keep watching the periods of slack breeze, thinking I could ride in but then two minutes later the wind picks up. More time to read on the bus. 🍃

Honestly I can’t wait until closer to Valentines Day ♥️ when there is enough daylight in the evening to ride both ways, then I can avoid transit both ways. Tomorrow I am going to drive in as there is the office Holiday Party 🤶 but today I’ll bus it in. One advantage to busing it both ways is I don’t have to watch the bike 🚲 as I ride home on bus, so I can really get into the book I’m reading. Currently the title of choice is Phil Hashieder’s Complete Guide to Butchering. Been doing a lot of reading about meat 🥩 lately, which is kind of ironic as a lot of people think I’m a vegetarian because I rarely eat meat except those rare time I’m out or visiting people, where they make meat like the center of their plate. 🍽️ I’d rather eat more beans and other things that have less saturated fats. Finished up reading Sharon Stronger’s The Doable Off-Grid Homestead, had some interesting ideas and I would have liked to spend more time re-reading a few sections but somebody else had a Hold on book and it was due back today.

Fried up some onions last night with pea soup, spaghetti squash and balsamatic vinger, 🧅 and that was dinner followed by pulverized frozen blueberries with oatmeal, some sugar-free syrup and unsweetened coca powder for a chocolately dessert. Chocolate is good stuff, I forget, and if you get the unsweetened baking chocolate it’s pretty healthy too. 🍫 Well, compared to a candy bar. I also did strawberry pancakes with thawed frozen strawberries blended in, along with some chocolate, two shredded carrots, some Stevia, an egg, milk oatmeal, and whole-wheat flour for breakfast. And lots of giner Good stuff, I know chocolate-strawberry pancakes is the thing of kids even if I did stick a lot of shredded carrots in the mix for bulk. 🥕 Why grow up? It’s probably still healthier then even the Woke-branded Organic Health Pancake Mixture Solution. 🥞

Like usual, everything is broke at work, 🖥️ and vendors aren’t playing along good, but that’s life at Data Services. Truth is I like the coding and data gathering part far of work far better then dealing with the people and the systems. Honestly, I’m hoping we can do the big address update soon, ✉️ because I like doing that –  it’s kind of mindless work reviewing the records and I can watch a YouTube video as I do it – but also often involves writing scripts and creativity to fix big batches of records at once. Though at this point, 💾 I’ve already fixed the common errors with a series of shell and SQL scripts. I love working with xargs, running things in parallel and all the other Unix stuff.