random thoughts – Day 1,680 – (Wednesday) – parking, pizza, time

I left the house late this morning, but the ride was quick, so I arrived at the garage at around the usual time. Even still, I couldn’t get into the garage without becoming annoyed. A driver was blocking the ramp just beyond the entrance, waiting for someone to exit a space, who did not seem quite ready to exit yet. When the driver was finally ready to back out of the coveted spot, they couldn’t, because the dummy blocking the ramp and waiting was too close. It took forever.

 The next challenge in the quest for a parking space was the construction taking place on levels four and five. The lower levels are packed full, and the ramps to four and above are half closed off with chain link fencing, as well as half of levels four and five.

Add to the mix the drivers who might possibly be psychologically self-centered but can’t manage to center their vehicles between the yellow painted lines marking the spaces. I passed three vehicles that were each straddling two spaces. One sporty vehicle looked to be parked at a deliberate angle across two spaces, one looked like an accidental encroachment of just enough of the second space to render it impossible for anything larger than a mini to fit, and the third involved a huge pickup that was backed into two spots, with near perfect symmetry and balance with the yellow line running beneath the center of the vehicle. 

I ended up on the fifth level, which was deserted, save for one already parked car and piles of construction materials. In the gloom of the cloudy or maybe smoky-from-some-wildfires burning not that far away morning, it looked like a movie set and I half expected some zombie-type creatures to appear at any moment. 

Level five, 10/30/24 at 5:13 pm.

In the whack-a-doodle way that time likes to mess with us mere humans, the pace of the day in the office started normal-ish, but then zipped by almost as quickly as a weekend day. And not just for me. Others in the office felt the same way. We had our monthly Sales and Marketing Team Meeting with a lunch. We ate pizza and salad and birthday cake like there was no tomorrow. 

Back at our desks, in the blink of an eye, suddenly it was 2:00. And then it was 5:00, and before I knew it I was back in the deserted fifth level of the garage with the low sun skimming the downtown rooftops and sliding in through the garage window to play over the construction materials. It looked prettier than it did in the morning, and was exactly the sort of scene I would have spent an hour exploring and photographing in my days of black and white film, but today, I kind of just wanted to get home, so I didn’t allow too much time for it.

In traffic on the Aiken Street bridge.

The drives home have been allowing for more flexible routing. Lately, if the traffic isn’t all piled up on Aiken Street, I take the right and head over that bridge instead of the one on University Avenue that causes me so much aggravation. Sitting on the Aiken Street bridge provides a view of a section of the river I haven’t spent much time staring at out the car window, so it’s a nice change of scenery.