News: Funny Ha Ha

Long time, no post! Anyway, here's some stuff to kill some time.

• Yo Mama jokes are universal!
• For Fluzz:
  

Knittin' Crap: SFAC JJA Tour

What with moving and starting a new job, I was woefully lax in my Starfleet duties, only managing a handful of missions during the June/July/August tour.

Mission	Report
June Brig	This prisoner served a long and well-deserved sentence. The first time I thought it was finally ready for release, it turned out to be completely too large, with mysterious repeats that shouldn’t have been there. I had to start over from the beginning! This time, however, it meets the release requirements:
June Shuttle Mission (got zapped into a temporal rift and popped out in early August for points): Crochet a bag that represents your family, chosen or blood.	This bag represents my family’s love of cats, particularly my father’s affection for the Siamese breed.
June Science Mission - Craft a gift for either the Romulans or the Klingons based on your research.	As a gift for the Romulans, I have created this miniature hologram of Mr Spock, as a celebration of his work toward peace between the Federation and Romulan Empire.
July Brig	These prisoners were supposed to record my visit last month to Regulus V, but the report was delayed, so they had to be held for questioning! Requesting release now that the report is finished!
August Brig	This prisoner was supposed to report for a mission last month, but she spent too much time doing her hair and thus was late for duty. Her hair is done and she’s ready for action now, though!
August Medical Mission - Craft something that represents the time distortion that we are experiencing by crafting something multi-colored.	The time distortion somehow affected not only the color wavelengths of this thermal wrap but also seems to have caused the top and bottom edges to become vastly different lengths.
August Science Mission - Craft something ‘disguised’ to look like another object.	This device may look like a flower, but it is actually a monitoring device that can be discreetly fastened in one’s hair.

Crochet Overlap Vest pattern by Aya Kasama (笠間綾)
Siamese Cat Crochet Block pattern by Melody Griffiths
Coquille Shawl pattern by Mary Lou Egan
Crochet flower from 238 Best Lace Motif Pattners

Metro Journal: Welcome Aboard! Next Stop, Your Stop!

I haven't fallen off the face of the earth. I did, however, move into my permanent (for now) apartment two weeks ago, and have been slowly settling in with the cats.

I've been commuting most mornings for the past week by taking a bus to the Sunnyvale Caltrain station, and then riding the train. For 5 minutes. To the next stop. Yes, it's slightly silly, but it's less irritating than driving, there's a shuttle from the station to the office, and a bus-only plan isn't very viable, because the VTA bus routes here make even less sense than they do for riders not going to downtown LA. Grid? Ha! Let's just pick two random endpoints, draw some squiggles on the map, and call it a bus route. The "most efficient" bus route to the office, which is less than 10 miles away in the car, is to take a bus west, overshooting the cross-street by a couple miles, then take the bus that I had actually taken while I was in temporary housing. The whole thing would take well over an hour with some waiting in between busses. *shrug* I think I will eventually get a bike, and then I can take the bus west to Stevens Creek Nature Trail and ride about 3 miles north to the office on a trail that has no cars on it (unless the driver has gotten terribly lost). I'll have to work myself up for that.

Anyway, back to Caltrain. It's the commuter heavy rail here in the Bay Area. The trains are pretty nice, everything has been efficient so far (a train will be 5 minutes late, but that is as bad as it's been). The Sunnyvale station is about 1.25 miles from my apartment, and since the bus schedule starts getting sparse before I make it back, I've been walking home most evenings. The weather here is so much cooler than it is around Glendale, so it's not too warm, even moving around, at that time.

Bus Journal: Welcome to the VTA

So, I moved up to the Bay Area last month. I've had to do quite a bit of driving, and while drivers up here aren't stupid in quite the same way that Southern California drivers are, they are equally stupid in their own, very special ways. So.... I've been trying out the public transportation here.

I'd taken the VTA (Valley Transit Authority, for Santa Clara County (home of Silicon Valley)) on previous visits. The buses are generally much nicer, with actual cushioning on the seats, as are the riders I've encountered. (As in generally nicer, not with generally more cushioning on their seats.) However, VTA suffers from the same problem as LA County's Metro: whether a bus can get you where you need to go is hit or miss. Partially because of the shape of the inhabited area of the valley, and partly for reasons that may harken back to a history before my time, coverage is not gridded or even or logical-looking.

I've already gotten my "Clipper Card," the reloadable card analogous to TAP in LA so you can load bus passes and fares and so forth for the various transit authorities in the area. (San Francisco ferries and BART, the northern Bay light rail, use it, too.) I got a VTA pass. The problem is that, not only is the card reader not in the same place as it is in LA (on the fare machine thing), it's not even consistently in the same other place on every bus. I'll figure it out eventually, maybe.

I also am getting a Caltrain (heavy commuter rail which runs up into San Francisco, analogous to Metrolink in LA) pass at no cost through work. It turns out that the apartment I seem to be moving to probably won't make the pass quite as useful for the commute, but it will still be useful for going up into San Francisco on the weekends and such. It looks like I'll be just over a mile from the Sunnyvale Caltrain station.

More on transit here as I figure it out myself...

News: Cat Wisdom

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