Trains Were So Loud

On the eighteenth of January I wrote that I was in a lot of pain while I was writing with the ice pack the night before.  I texted my friend and she collected me and got me into bed and set an alarm to buy ace bandages and coffee the next morning.  We left the window open but the trains were so loud that we had to close it a little later.

When she left for Safeway at around seven the next morning I snoozed for an hour until she texted me.  I was getting ready to go when she returned with an Ace bandage for my ankle.  I took some ibuprofen and made sure my bag was ready and we went down and checked out before eating the continental breakfast.  I was worried that she might get stuck on the wrong side of the tracks when our train came because she wanted to stop by a coffee shop, so we made to leave.

At the corner of Bridge Street I hobbled away to the station with her bag and watched the crossing to see how things turned out.  Almost inevitably I got a good view of her returning running across the tracks with a cup of coffee as the crossing arm came down as an eastbound cargo train approached.  The engineer had just started blowing his horn as she made it across.

We were talking about how ironic it was that she had met a train at the crossing when a fellow passenger told us that our train was not likely going to be on time.  When it did show up twenty minutes late my bar code didn’t work and they just asked me for my name.  A conductor let us swap our seats but we decided to sneak a couple of other seats to watch Donner Lake and pass.  We talked about social media campaigns until we had passed Emigrant and Yuba Gaps and that was when another conductor came by to kick us out of the seats we had taken.

From there I read the paper and we ate the rest of the snacks.  My friend got us coffee and a sandwich.  I noted that Colfax was a nice town and that I might want to stay there some time.  After that we took photos of the County Courthouse in Auburn and were amazed at the snow plows in Roseburg.

The outlets kept going out from the usage of so many people using them so I had to look around for a better set.  Eventually we moved to the observation car and dickered over our various responsibilities.  I had a glass of whisky and when we started talking about how I felt about the way that she communicates we stopped getting along.

I made the best of it and we decided to head back to our seats but by that time a lot of people had detrained and I started to write in a frantic manner.  My friend had mentioned that we might get picked up but I knew that it wasn’t likely.

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.