Dooooooooooooooowntown

You can always get it dooooooooowntown.

I started my new job yesterday (btw people I'm not that flaky on jobs I'm just a temp worker) and it is immensely better than my last position. And even cooler I'm working DOWNTOWN Minneapolis which is a pain to get to in the morning, but oh so worth it. My last position was also in Minneapolis, but in the ghetto and not near anything cool. Here I'm in the thick of things, surrounded by cool bistros and sky scrapers with endless possibility of fun times. If only my husband were here and working in the same area, so many places for us to explore. I even have a Starbucks on my walk from the bus stop to my work, which is a blessing and a curse all at the same time.

But really, really? I went last night to buy a bus pass thinking its gotta be cheaper than paying cash each time I got on, only to drop $76 for a 31-day pass. Sweet mother of Daisy! I sucked it up and figured it was cheaper than driving (definately cheaper than parking downtown) and good for the earth. Whats $76 when you're cutting your carbon emissions?

Only to get on the bus this morning and be told I need to pay 75 cents extra because its an EXPRESS bus.

....

I was pissed. Luckily I walk right past a transit office on my way to work as well so I slipped in there only to find that if I wanted to by a 31-day for the express bus I needed to cough up $104 not $76.

I might have turned purple at this point. I'm not sure.

$104 for 30 days. Are you serious? That comes to about $4.52 each day (weekdays yo, I ain't about to come down here on the weekends on the bus) which ok, so thats an average of $1 less a day. Still.

My pocketbook hurts.

And, just to add some insult to this injury, prior to this job starting I was thinking that if I was going to ride the bus at least this position would be spring and summer so I'd have some beautiful weather to be tromping around the bus stops in.

Yea. Yesterday we had a freak snowstorm that dumped six inches of snow on us. Snow (mixed with sleet as the temp hovered at 32/0C all day) and slush I had to slosh through- in my inadequate mary janes- to get to the bus yesterday evening and dig my car out of.

Not cool. But, the upside was that I was not the one driving through the slush and traffic to get home. Nope, I had an insane bus driver to do that. And now, I know that buses are (almost) the biggest thing on the road, but the way the driver drove made me think he considered himself the godzilla of 35W. He was driving one of those accordian buses and as he flew past a tiny two-door car (who was driving quite sanely for the condition- blinding sleet/blizzard) he cut over in front of them so close that I could almost imagine the tail end flinging that little car off the road behind him. Around about the time he played chicken with a semi and dropped one side of the bus off the road I just closed my eyes, turned up my ipod, and imagined I was someplace else.

It was an adventure.

If only I could figure out a way to drop down the price of riding the bus.

And hey, I just want to put a proposition out there for the powers that be:

If you're gonna raise gas prices and thereby raise the price of EVERY OTHER THING ON EARTH, do us a favor and raise our salaries as well.

kthanxbye.