End-of-school-year routine change

So, today was the last day of the 2010-2011 school-year for my girls. As a result, for the next couple of months, I don't have to walk the older daughter to her morning bus-stop. In turn, that means I can take an earlier bus in to work in the morning.

Between that and the retirement of my normal Park-and-Ride in not quite three weeks, I'm pretty much expecting that my morning ride is gonna be teetering on the edge of predictability. At best.

But we'll have to see. Nineteen days until the station-change. Morning schedule-change starts tomorrow.

Today's ride home is slow - there's some kind of road-work slowing traffic from I-25 to 6th Avenue. Slowest I remember it ever being. And, of course, tonight is one of my more time-critical nights. If the lane's still blocked off tomorrow morning on the trip in, I may take a different route back home.

Addendum: If the same thing's going on tomorrow night, taking a different route home won't matter - all of 6th Avenue was bogged until Federal. Whee... That'd definitely be an advantage of light-rail - no traffic delays...

Happy Memorial day!

Since I won't be riding the bus tomorrow, figured I'd share my brand-new, never-before-seen top-secret steak-grilling recipe by way of making up for there not being a post...

I assembled bits and pieces of this from various places around the web, but it all came together tonight (to a finish where my normally crazy-picky younger daughter even said that the steak was alright... ;-) )

This should work even with fairly cheap cuts of meat. Tonight I used a chuck top blade cut, 2 steaks totaling about 1.25 pounds.

1. Mix about a cup (yes, you read that right, a cup) of coarse salt (kosher or sea-salt, whatever you can get ahold of), and about 2-1/2 tablespoons of whatever steak-rub you prefer (I used some old Costco/Kirkland mesquite rub) in a plastic bag.
2. Pour a layer of the salt/flavor mix onto a plate, no more than 1/8- to 1/4-inch thick, and plop your steaks down on it. Pour the rest of the salt/flavor mix over it, and pack around the edges so that as much of the steak has a slat/flavor crust over it as you can manage. it isn't critical to coat any edge-fat you might have, but it doesn't hurt.
3. Let the steak sit crusted with the salt/flavor mix for about 20 minutes per 3/4-inch thickness of the meat (a good time to light the grill and let the coals ash over, in my experience).
4. Wash the salt/flavor mix off the steaks, and pat dry with paper towels. The meat should feel dry, dry, dry on the surface.
5. Place the steaks in a plastic bag, and cover with about 1/2 bottle of beer (I used Durango brewing Co.'s Amber Ale). Expel as much air from the bag as you can without getting the beer/juice mix all over everything, and let that sit while...
6. ...you dab a few tablespoons of olive oil over the grill, put it in place over your coals, cover, and wait until there's white smoke coming out of the vent-holes in the grill-lid - this, I think, indicates that the grill itself is hot enough to sear the meat on contact.
7. Plop your steaks down on the grill, and let them sear until any edge-fat on the meat is just starting to burn - the main part of the meat should be anywhere from caramel to walnut colored, which (for me) usually takes until there's just a few wisps of smoke coming out of the vent-holes in the grill. Turn and repeat.
8. The steaks will take 10-20 minutes, so if you're quick, clever, or willing to use prepackaged side-dishes, you'll have time to make one or two.
9. Once the second side is seared (or just slightly burnt if you have fat on an edge), take the meat off the grill, and rinse with hot water.
10. Serve. Enjoy.

This worked out really well for me today, so I figured I'd share it. It'd probably work really well with Crash Hot Potatoes.

Missed my normal bus this morning...

Riding the bus daily tends, I think, to reinforce routine. And habit. Case in point: this morning, because my normal morning routine was slightly disrupted, I forgot to grab my bus-pass/building card-key before heading to my Park-and-Ride. They're both on a lanyard (intended, I think, for USB thumb-drives), hanging with keys next to the door I exit from every morning. One of the first things I do when I get home is to hang them there. In the morning, before walking my older daughter to *her* bus-stop, I slip the lanyard on.

But I forgot this morning. Made it all the way to the PnR before I remembered, too...

Though it's only a few minutes round-trip to get back home, retrieve them, and get back to catch a bus, I missed it by about 2 minutes, partially because of geese on the road, and partially because there was a police-car with lights running trying to navigate around the geese...

The Mathematics of Light Rail

So a new sign went up at my Park-and-Ride yesterday:

Though it's a year or two away, I'd already done some preliminary number-crunching as far as the economics and scheduling of taking the light rail a few months ago:

• The light-rail and bus will depart from the same location;
• The light-rail has nine stops between where I'd be getting on and the closest stop to where I work;
• The bus has two stops, at most, between my boarding and deboarding areas, and frequently has only one, since I tend to walk from the Market Street Station to the office (as noted earlier);
• Once the light-rail's running, the end of the line is two or three blocks further from my office than the Market Street station (though I gather that they'll close that station down in favor of Union Station, where the light-rail will stop);
• The bus has to deal with traffic, while the rail won't.
• The rail will run every 8-10 minutes, I gather, while the bus runs every 30 minutes (though, to be fair, there are 4-5 bus-routes that'd get me downtown within walking distance of the office).

All in all, I'm still kinda on the fence about whether I'll continue busing in, or plan to be on the train. Guess I'll have to wait and see...

Different types of buses in the Denver area

RTD-Denver runs three different types of buses on the open roads, plus the mall shuttles on 16th Street Mall downtown. For the sake of being able to identify them, I'll call them standard, double-length and coach buses. In my travels over the last several months I've been on at least one of each of them, though my normal bus has been a coach bus every time but one.

Coach buses are tall, have every seat facing forward, and have luggage-compartments underneath them. Since I'm usually riding the AF that goes through downtown to the airport, it is perhaps no great surprise that the AF is almost always a coach bus. At least that's what it appears to me. Coach buses have six wheels - two in front and two pairs in back. I also noticed a couple days back that one of the two pairs in the back are tied to the steering. They seat 55 in the configuration RTD uses, and have room for one wheelchair next to the wheelchair lift without impacting the other seating at all. That may sound like a lot of seats, but during the first few weeks of classes at Auraria, I've seen 5-10 people standing because there weren't any seats left.

A standard bus has a mix of seats facing forward and inward, usually with the inward-facing seats over the wheels, of which there are four. I've seen standard buses other places around the country, so I suspect that they're about the same pretty much everywhere.

The double-length buses are, for all practical purposes, a standard bus with an attached passenger trailer. The trailer-like part has forward-facing seating, except around the pivot-join from the front part of the bus to the back.

I haven't ridden anything but the coach buses with any great frequency, though I spent a few weeks before the schedule-change experimenting with taking the bus all the way from home to work and all the way back, so I've had a bit of exposure to the standard bus configuration now too.

No post for yesterday or the day before...

More slacking on my part, I'm afraid...

Been slacking the last couple of days...

Thursday and Friday may or may not have been uneventful - I don't really know. I spent most of my rides in and out those two days watching a movie on my new Droid phone.

And trying to stay dry. It's been raining brass monkeys on the way to the evening bus, and both nights I was faced with the options of either standing out in the rain waiting for a bus that has (rarely) been known to skip the outdoor stop, or walking six or eight blocks to the Market Street station I mentioned earlier, and waiting where it's warm and dry. Colorado weather being what it is, it wasn't an easy decision to make on Friday (though I ended up heading for the Station). Thursday was easier - I lit out a few minutes early, hoping to make the walk during a brief break in the rain - which proved to be a fruitless effort.

So, lesson learned (and acted upon) - I now have an umbrella that can fold down to small enough to fit in a coat pocket. I think I'll also order a messenger bag from my CafePress store (http://www.cafepress.com/GeekWizardry), if we don't have one around the house somewhere that I can use, though most days (thus far) it wouldn't be holding much more than my new umbrella...

The Market Street station

Promised some online friends that I'd try to get some pics of my usual morning deboarding location, so here they are. It may not be obvious from the pics, but the Market Street station is underground (a fact that amused one of said friends - or at least prompted a comment to the effect that with all the mountains here in Colorado, it seemed odd to think of something being underground).

Market Street Station -Looking at Gate 2, where I deboard.

Market Street Station -The escalator up to 17th Street

Market Street Station -The entrance from 17th Street

Feeling bleah...

I suppose that one of the more significant downsides to a bus-commute, or any mass transit, really, is that if you aren't feeling well, you still have to wait. I'm not feeling horrible today, just a bit under the weather. I left work as soon as I could justify it today (got my 8 hours in, barely). But I still have to wait for the bus.

At least it stopped raining. Mostly.

And the wait wasn't horrible, just longer than i'd've liked. Ah, well...

The schedule-change noted yesterday did, in fact get me in to work about ten to fifteen minutes earlier than I used to. It might also allow me to get home slightly earlier as well, assuming the powers-that-be at work are able to relax their "must-be-in-the-office-during-core-hours" policy. Slightly. Like, by fifteen or twenty minutes.

Odds aren't good, though.

Taking the bus is definately preferable to paid parking on game-days, too. Today's Rockies game didn't bump parking-prices nearly as bad as the opening-day game (which increased at least one lot's daily rate to $25 according to one co-worker). But the ones I keep an eye on still went up as much as 100%.

Not feeling well enough to try and get a clearer pic of the new station today - will try tomorrow.

Schedule-change day...

So, as part of their ongoing light-rail efforts, RTD had to modify some of the line-schedules for routes serving the Cold Spring park-and-ride. This had been known for a few weeks, and to their credit, they had revised schedules and alerts to changes printed a while back. But for a few folks, the change wasn't apparent. And for others (me), it hadn't quite sunk in yet.

As a result, I missed my normal bus by about 30 seconds. I literally saw it pulling away as I was walking up the sidewalk from the parking area to the stop. Guess I'll have to kick my older daughter out the door a few minutes earlier starting tomorrow...

Ah, well... means I'll get in a few minutes earlier until they open the Federal Center Station in a few weeks...

Cold Spring PnR, Gate A

Cold Spring PnR - Lower level

 Can't really see much of the new Federal Center Station grounds from the current PnR, but it's at least paved now. They're claiming that the new station lot will hold 1,000 cars. We'll see... Me, I'm just happy it'll be a bit closer...

Can't really see it well at all...

When and How to Detour

The last couple of days were uneventful rides, and I was busy dealing with a change in cell-phone, some bathroom painting-prep, and other miscellany.

I've been on a couple of rides (inbound to downtown both, so far) where the traffic on the highway was bad enough that the driver felt the need to detour off the highway in order to try and keep to their schedule. I was curious, so I asked one of them once how they chose when and how to detour. I gather from his response that they have a reasonable amount of discretion, so long as they don't skip any stops. They don't have to stick to any particular route, though there are some pre-approved detour-routes available for them (routes where someone's already determined that the buses can make all the necessary turns, etc.).

I'd be surprised if they didn't basically just allow detours along any established routes, though. There're all these signs with route-numbers and arrows indicating which way various routes should go at key intersections, etc., etc.

Well, it turned out to be a weeks worth of labor, dealing with the bathroom.

Before (well, slightly into the process, really - I'd already gotten the old, broken tile removed before I thought to take pictures):

After:

I'm tired, but the majority of the labor is done - it's just re-attaching things here and there, putting drawers back, etc. Tomorrow, I'm back on the bus again...

Taking a few days off...

Since there's remodeling work going on at home, I'm not expecting to post anything for at least a few business days, maybe as long as a week - that will depend on how the bathroom re-tiling goes.

Wish me luck...

Quiet Commute Day, "Interline" buses

As I've been riding the bus, I've noticed more and more buses showing "Interline" on their route-signs, and wondered what that meant, exactly. So I asked. In retrospect, it should've been obvious, so I'll blame lateness of the hour and/or lack of coffee for me not making the connection and being able to answer it for myself.

Each route is a "line," in RTD parlance. From time to time, a bus may need to be taken out of service for one line, and put back into service for another (if a bus breaks down, or presumably gets swamped - I didn't think to ask under what circumstances that can/does happen). When they do that, they switch their route-signs to "Interline" so that people who might be expecting to see that route (before or after the switch) won't feel as though they are being skipped at a stop. Pretty straightforward, actually. I even saw an "Interline" bus change to a normal route the day I asked the question, as I was leaving the Park-n-Ride.

Uneventful Commutes: 3 May 2011

Today was pretty uneventful both ways - my normal morning seat-mate was poring over notes in preparation for finals (which start next week), so apart from the normal pleasantry-greetings, we hardly spoke. It was even slow on the convertible/bug/etc. game, for a *total* of maybe 17 points, if both ways were counted, though since the coffee-maker was out this morning the morning score might've been hampered by undercaffeination.

The convertible/bug/etc. game is a family variation of... "slug bug," I think it's called? No slugging, though, and our own specific rules that sometimes feel like they change without notice. To the best of my awareness, the rules as they stand now are:

• Volkswagen Beetles (classic or old) are worth a point;
• Convertibles are worth a point;
• Jeeps with removable fabric tops count as convertibles, but the newer hard-top models don't (at least until we can see that those hard-top roofs are removable like the soft-top ones are);
• Smart Cars are worth a point;
• Points are cumulative - so a convertible Beetle or Smart Car is worth 2 points;
• Scoring isn't allowed until the vehicle is in motion (and yes, backing out of the carport counts);
• Different people can call different scoring criteria (i.e., one person calls a red bug convertible and at the same time another calls convertible red bug, in which case each gets one of the 2 points for the sighting);

Points are compared and a winner is determined when the car is shut off;

My record (with these rules) for a trip back home on the bus is 28 points, and included (of all things) a convertible truck of some kind. Willy's? I don't know.

I've been proposing that we add license-plate rules as well - something along the lines of:

• Out-of state (more than 50 miles from a state border, and not counting the car you're riding in): 1 point
• Out-of country: 1 point;
• Out-of-contiguous states (Alaska or Hawaii): 1 point;
• Off-continent (Hawaii, which I've seen once, *and* on a bug; or south american or European plates, which we've never seen): 1 point;
• Off-planet (not in my lifetime, I'd guess, but I believe in covering my bases): 1 point;

These are a point per criteria, same as convertible/car-type are, so *very* theoretically, a convertible bug with plates from a foreign moonbase would be 7 points in one fell swoop.

Can you tell that when we take family trips, we're in the car a lot?

(edit: trips, not tripes...)

Daily Commute Observations: 2 May 2011

The Morning Commute:

So, pretty much as expected, the openings to many conversations on this morning's ride in was bin Laden. The guy that I frequently share a seat with (whose name I have, of course forgotten) asked first thing if I'd heard about it, and wondered about the relevance of the whole thing. Can't say as I blame or disagree, though I harbor some small satisfaction from the idea that we finally got the bastard who planned the attack that cost us so many innocent lives.

But, with that out of the way, he asked about my weekend, and given the fun we've been having with plumbing stuff I allowed how it was of some amazement to me that we can put a man on the moon, but the basic technology of plumbing haven't changed substantially (barring new materials) since the days of the Roman Empire.

I also asked if he'd heard the story about how the Roman Empire inadvertently dictated the physical dimensions of the booster-rockets for the space shuttle, which he hadn't. I won't reproduce the entire story here, but variations can be found all over the Web (including at http://www.snopes.com/history/american/gauge.asp, as of this writing). My seat-mate is a history student at one of the schools on the Auraria campus, and was amused by the story, and the discussion eventually ambled to technology, history, and how the two interact - a favorite topic of mine, if only because I believe that it shows just how unpredictable and chaotic the world really is. I also mentioned the "Connections" series to him (see links at the end of this post - they are, I believe, links to the first chapters of each episode).

The Afternoon Commute:

You know your bus driver is good when he's a designated trainer for new drivers on a route. At the same time, with trainee drivers (who are, by definition less experienced, and likely less jaded as well), you end up with some odd or even awkward situations.

This afternoon's trainee driver was very tentative pulling in to the Market Street station. In all fairness, these coach buses are big, and probably handle like a beached whale on roller skates, so I guess it's only to be expected, at some level. He's got a good PA voice, though... And once we got out on the streets, he had no bravery concerns.

Connections: The Trigger Effect
Connections: Death in the Morning
Connections: Distant Voices
Connections: Faith in Numbers
Connections: Wheel of Fortune
Connections: Thunder in the Skies
Connections: The Long Chain
Connections: Eat, Drink and Be Merry
Connections: Countdown
Connections:  Yesterday, Tomorrow and You

Taking bets...

...on the most popular topic of conversation on tomorrow's bus-rides:

Osama Bin Laden's demise seems a shoo-in.