Sometimes ya just gotta bitch

West Oakland Bart Station

I've got to level with you guys.  I can't stand the Bay Area. How did I live here for so long?  Why did I like it in the first place?  I am aware that my attitude about being here is not the best, but truly, I miss my home in Berlin, my partner Robert, the Impronauts, and my friends there.  Working at the Randall Museum Summer Camp is great and it does feed a part of my soul, but evenings and weekends feel like a desolate waiting room.  I wait to go back to work.  I wait to go back home.

On Thursday morning, I woke up at 5:45 like I usually do, let the chickens out of their hutch, drank some coffee, put on my summer camp clothes and walked to the BART station.  It was surrounded by police.  One of these very unhelpful men (they were all men) told me there had been a fire and BART was closed.  "I need to get to work.  Is there a shuttle bus?" 
"No ma'am.  I don't know."
So me, totally lost in Oakland, is left spinning in circles until a really nice woman named Phoebe walks by at a fast clip and says, "I think there's a bus this way."  We walk about half a mile to a bus stop on an ugly, gray, industrial block where we wait.  A bus passes us by.  I am going to be late for the second time this week.  (The first was because I had to go to a drop-in clinic to get medicine for my seriously debilitating allergies.  The medicine worked.  I can breathe again!) A car driven by a buxom black lady with a warm face pulls up.  Her son is in the front seat.  A woman gets in.  "I've got room for two more."  She says.  Phoebe and I get in the car.  We whiz across the bridge in the carpool lane.  I get out of the car at Embarcadero Station and catch a Muni Metro to Castro Station, then walk up the hill to the Randall, only 45 minutes late.  Not bad!

BART has been repaire and I'll take it to Rockridge today so I can go grocery shopping, then get ready for my garage sale and hopefully find something good to read.  I'm am counting the days until I return...