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My timing has been a bit off today.
It's technically not altering a routine if the behavior changed has not had a chance to repeated, but on my second pedestrian trip to the library, I tried something different.
My sister wanted to go to the library, but was not as keen as me to make the cross-city trek to cover the distance between my parent's apartment and the main branch of the Missouri River Regional Library, which is approximately 2 and a half miles.
Note: This calculation was derived in the 8 seconds I spent scanning over a city map my mother gave me and by the fact it takes me 40 minutes, on average, to cross the distance. I walk a mile about every 15 minutes, and once you throw in other obstacles like stop lights, sharp ups and downs [especially on the aptly named, High Street] and the twisting contours associated with a downtown built parallel the winding riverfront, it's 2.5 miles. Trust me.
Anyway, without discussing this with anybody who had a vehicle (for both my parents were out), we conspired that I would set out a bit later than usual ("Usual" as used in the previous sentence, means "as opposed to yesterday when I left around noon and got back before the evening news"), dawdle as best I could between the books, get my two maximum hours on the internet, and then wait for a ride that would come around six, maybe seven.
While I still don't know if this plan is doomed to fail (for my expected ride is still a few hours away), I do know I waited just long enough to reach the computer lab for school to be out and the terminals to be filled... as well as a lengthy waiting list for the computers.
Clever.
I muttered the lament that graced the top of the post, quickly followed by the retort that accompanied the original. It was more dimness than brilliance that led to my stumbling. Still, thanks to the books I'd pulled during my previous turn in the stacks, I had plenty of reading material to turn to. It also appears I had a better sense of patience than those who came before me, for as long as it took for me to scribble down the start of this post, nearly a half dozen names were read off without response, and I was issued a computer terminal - unchallenged, with only minimal delay.
If "all's well that ends well," maybe I should finally forgive director James Cameron for Titanic, for, after all, Jack's still dead at the end of the whole debacle.
And now, even as I begin to feel sharp twangs of the remaining die-hard Titanic fans everywhere (you know who you are), begin to mentally attack me, I realize the opposite is true as well.
Alls bad that ends with swift and unrelenting psychic attacks.
Final moral: should have ended this post four paragraphs earlier.
As I said earlier, my timing's been off today.
Lesson learned. Ouch.
