The Yuba River Bridge

In the morning of the twenty-third of November I woke with a start and sat in the bed.  I knew I would go to sleep if I lay down again.  Amtrak sent me a message saying the train was late.  We got ready to go and rode to the station.  We stood in the middle of the platform but ended up moving a couple of times before boarding from the center of the platform.  The conductor didn’t have our names because we had purchased our tickets at eleven the night before.

On board we had to stuff our bikes in places and the conductor took our information before sending us to the lounge.  There we broke out the whisky as a second conductor approached.  He asked us for a ticket and the first one entered to say we were ok.  My companion tethered my iPod and we looked at photos for a while.  Eventually, we could see out the window because there were lights on some of the buildings.  I saw the Yuba River Bridge.

We moved to the east side of the train when Sacramento came up and the train stopped for about 45 minutes.  I got us coffee and when the train was making to leave I checked on the dining car and got my companion and I a seat.  Initially she wanted to talk about organizing tweed and other things but we had a visitor from Bernal Heights.  She found us very interesting.  She and I had the special and my companion had the omlette.

When we were done I left my companion alone for a minute to read her book.  A bit later the two of us ended up sitting in business class.  The conductor came by and let us stay.  I immediately fell asleep and when I came to we were nearing Emeryville and would have to get off the train soon.

We went to find our bikes and talked to the conductor about accents.  When we got off we bundled our things and tried to escape the fumes in the station so we could fold our bikes back together.We had missed the ferry so went to a coffee shop called Modern near 12th.  In the meantime my companion’s roommate had let us know that the handyman had come by so we headed to BART to catch him.

At Civic Center we rode to the apartment and up.  My companion paid him and we unpacked.   Later we went for a walk through Duboce Park to Divis and looked at some shops.  I also passed some time at Walgreens and and read a bit from a copy of the MIT tech review.  I read a few pages from an article titled “Who Owns the Robots” and realized that there was absolutely no discussion of robot ownership.

I tried to show my companion the kitchen store but it was closed.  So instead we looked into a couple of other shops and even traced the labyrinth in Duboce Park before going to the natural foods store.  Later I kicked off my shoes and started writing while she made pasta and salad for me.  We wrote up a list of bike rides to take: Pt Reyes, Santa Cruz, Gilroy (SJ and Palasades), Antiques (Napa, Sonoma), Henry Coe, SF Tweed, Chico Tweed, Sac Tweed, Folsom or Zephyr, Lady’s Ride and the Seer Sucker.  I noted that listing of writing them would save time but they really needed to grow or build organically.

This is an occasional series chronicling my life. This Notebook Analysis series is meant to be contemporaneous piece developed as an agglomeration of my notebook pages. In each of these posts I used my notes to develop my recent thoughts.