What About The Bus Service?
Where I live is a town, surrounded on three sides by similar towns (although with more business/corporations/industry; shopping (and whatever else) than where I live. The town, itself, is not geographically small. It's twenty-six square miles (as compared to say, the small Boston-area city in which I grew up - which was/is three square miles - but which packed into it whatever cities had in those days, including two big public libraries). I don't know what's there these days. Where I live these days didn't even have a "normal" public library until some time in the last twenty years (or thereabouts). It's a "family town", though; so it boasts ten baseball fields and lots of things for elderly people.
The thing is, it's been a long time since I had little boys playing Little League; and I wasn't anywhere near even the borderline age for "senior" when my divorce "buggered up" my driver's license.
Before I did the first leg injury (the more complicated, more serious, one) I used to sometimes take the bus if I wanted to "do something special" and get to the limited but additional shopping areas. Once I did that first leg injury the idea of using the bus changed.
The town is also bordered by a city. There's where the bus/train station is, and it's where one would have to get to in order to get to either of the other neighboring towns (or anywhere else other than the town in which I live).
That's fine for the person who just has business in that city, and it's fine for the person who wants to get somewhere near the border between that city and my town. Other than that, trying to get anywhere else almost isn't even realistic, unless someone has, say, the whole day to kill and doesn't have to be anywhere at a certain time. First, whether one wants to hook up with a bus that's going somewhere other than back into my town, there's the usual waiting for whatever "correct bus" there is to wait for. The train station would get someone somewhere other than that city or my town, but if I need to get to, say, Boston (which is rare these days) my options are to have someone drop me off or else drive and go with me to whatever event it is we're going to.
In any case, the train from the station is in the city is out. One thing that eliminates it as an option is that if I don't have someone to drive or drop me off (for, say, a weekend event), there's no bus that would get me to and from the station to my own town.
There was a time when I found some temporary work in the next town over. It was only because my son would drop me off before going to work, himself; and then I'd take the afternoon bus from the place of work into the city, where I'd wait for the bus that would eventually get me back into my town.
Sometimes one bus would be later than usual, and I'd come awfully close to missing either the last bus from there into my own town, or the next-to-last. Sometimes there would be a long wait between the hourly buses. Either way, the last bus into my town is around five p.m. It was Winter when I did that. At the time, I'd leave that next-town-over workplace, ride around some office parks at the edge of my own town, and be on a bus that was in rush-hour traffic and going through the city in order to get to the station. It was, shall I say, "a hoot" - particularly since it wasn't exactly my "dream kind of work" that I was doing.
In order for my son to have time to drive me to work and get to his own job in time, we'd both have to be up super early in the morning (5:00 or so for him; 4:00 for me because at that time I was already dealing with "some kind of mental exhaustion thing" that meant I needed to be very organized and have plenty of getting-ready time, breakfast time, etc., rather than set off for a day's work as a frazzled mess). Besides, without a car there with me, and with "the commute", I needed to make sure I had some things with me, or wore some clothes, that I wouldn't have otherwise needed.
It didn't help that I was probably run down when some of us in the family got some kind of "flu thing", and I was left without a voice for afterward, but also took until Aprl to actually get most of my own voice back. It also didn't help that I threw out my back picking up something the wrong way (and not related at all to the work there). Well, there were a lot of things in personal life that "didn't help". Basically, I was kind of sick the whole time I worked there. The big worry was mainly a) not missing the bus that got to me to the station (which wasn't a big challenge), and b) (and more importantly) not missing that last five p.m. bus that would get me out of the city and into my own town.
My son worked in another direction entirely, but we had a plan that I'd take the bus to the Burger King in my town - where, if my son were to be late for some reason, particularly traffic, I could go in and comfortable have some coffee and maybe something to eat (or not, depending). The big thing was that I get that last bus out of the station and get myself more comfortably close to my own house (which, as it was, was three miles away).
If we, or I, needed to get something from the grocery store, we'd sometimes stop there before coming home. There were times when I'd leave where I was working at 2:30, wait until that bus to the station came, do whatever riding around there was to do, wait at the station for x amount of time; ride the last bus to BK (and take, maybe, twenty-minutes or so, riding the bus in rush hour all the way down into my town - and eventually actually get home around 6:30 or even 7:00)..
In any case, that was the first and only time I ever tried working outside of the town on a non-telecommute basis.
Back to the bus: The bus runs, as far as I know, every hour from around 6:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. It runs up and down "Street A" (the main drag); but because it stops at a hospital and some elderly housing, there's a whole section of Street A that no bus ever travels on. Instead, it takes a turn off the main drag and gets/drops off hospital people and elderly-housing people, and comes out on the main drag not far from that Burger King I mentioned. The outbound bus goes right to town line and then turns around. While shopping in that next town over is better and nicer than where I shop, and while a car ride to at least that additional shopping is a few minutes; a walk that far past the town line isn't all that handy.
In any event, in order for me to use either of the nearest bus stops I have to walk quite a way in some direction other than the one I really want to go in (but then factor in when the bus is coming or going or not picking anyone up because it's the last run).
Before the leg injury the bus at least had a twice-a-day (around lunch time) "indirect route" that meant, if I played my complicated cards right, I could get the bus, or be dropped off, at the corner of 'Streets B and C" (fairly close to my street, but most often not close enough for my purposes). It was a whole, complicated, deal; but sometimes I'd work it out in Summer or Winter. Apparently, that indirect route was stopped somewhere after I did the first leg injury. So now, i have to walk the mile/mile-and-half or so, plus or minus, from my house to the main drag. From there, I'd have to turn the walk from home-to-bus-stop from whatever distance the walk is to the main drag to, maybe, a mile-and-a-half/two-thirds or so (again, plus-or-minus - maybe even two miles?) to one of the two closest stops.
Leg injuries or no leg injuries, It just doesn't make sense for me to add distance to the walk to the main drag in order to get a bus that will eventually get me to where I could have gotten myself to by adding just a little more distance and getting myself to that shopping, which is just about three miles away.
It really doesn't make sense in view of the fact that I most often go out one weekend day with my sister, which is when I can pick up a heavier load of groceries. When the weather is good she and I sometimes go out for coffee one evening during the week. Last Winter pretty much eliminated that practice.
One problem for me, however, is that I can stock up on a number of groceries of one kind (frozen food, canned goods, etc.). Produce and breads aren't things a person can stock up on, and one person eating/shopping for only herself, can try to buy some extra (up to a point); but breads that aren't frozen turn green (and I only want to freeze x amount of bread anyway), lettuce goes brown, and tomatoes get soft.
Another problem is that I'm not always paid on a strict schedule. Depending on who it is that's paying me, I have things like straggling-in paychecks, pays from one or another kind of writing, and pays in irregular amounts. So, if I get to the store in a car on a weekend, but I'm not going to get a pay until Monday; that means I can't do the kind of shopping I need to do when I'm in a car. Instead, I may have to plan to get out on, say, that Monday or Tuesday. Up to a point, I've been able to work with this "rough-draft system" of shopping. When weather and/or leg injuries and or whatever other factors there are are added to the mix it can throw off any real system.
As far as I know, besides any bus that gets elderly people to shopping; there's some "little bus" that's available for some people who need, say, a ride to the doctor's (or something). I've never looked into it, because even if the fact that I'm now somewhere around the "border of senior" (or just over it; I still don't really know); I don't think that bus is meant for getting people grocery shopping.
There's no taxi service in my town. There have, over the years, been times when someone started a taxi service. None of them lasted. Several years ago there was one taxi service. I planned to get myself to the store to do Easter-dinner shopping for my whole family - only to be told it had gone out of business. I had a cart full of Easter food, treats, and whatever else and knew that dragging it the three miles home meant no refrigeration soon enough. My ex-husband was around to call, but he was working. That meant I had to leave the cart full of stuff with the grocery store (to go into their cold area) until my ex-husband could pick it up.
There are taxi services in the surrounding towns/city. If I really needed to get somewhere I could call one. The last I heard they charge for coming into the town. I don't know if they charge more for people who live farther into the town than, say, along the main drag or near one or another town line. It doesn't matter for my purposes. If, for example, I can't, for one reason or another, get my "extras" when I'm with my sister on the weekend, it's hardly worth the price of a taxi to get those extras (or even some not-so-extras) over the work week. I can either do without, pay top dollar at a convenience store, or walk to the grocery store.
In view of the fact that I work from home (less now than I had been, though), but also that I need to get some exercise, sun, fresh air, and natural light (more now after a Winter of not being able to be out walking at all); I can't see calling a taxi from another town.
And this - I think - concludes my series of "rock-bottom/foundation posts". They're the "lowest layer/level" of a foundation on which some "higher-level foundation" (and "foundation posts") have been/will be built. It isn't just a matter of my wanting to post that "foundation" on here for the sake of posting it all in one place somewhere. And, it isn't just a matter of wanting to post layer upon layer of "foundation" for the purpose of focusing on any of the issues associated with that "foundation" in future posts on here.
As I said somewhere in one of the first "foundation" posts, there are a number of things I plan to write about, or at least a number of points may want to make in places other than this, particular, blog. In fact, I have any number of reasons for wanting to get these "foundation posts" in writing
From here on (at least within the context of this particular blog and series of posts) I'm going to refer to "the next level of the foundation" as "Foundation B Posts" (and I'm going to stop using the quotation marks around "foundation"). If anyone has read anything at all up to this point I imagine he knows what I mean when I refer to "foundation" in this series of posts. I guess I started using the quotation marks as my own way of defining, organizing, a big picture/situation that is complex enough to have one limited set of constants that include a wide ride of variables before ever getting to some of the "non-constant variables". (I'm getting there....)
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