Transplanted Life
Friday, June 02, 2006
 
Eerily quiet
And I don't just mean that my life has been pretty much melodrama-free for the past week. This morning there were very few cars on the road or pedestrians walking around as I waited for the bus to take me for work. It's the sort of quiet morning that makes me wonder if Saturday came a day early and no-one told me, or I'd just lost track of days of the week. I mean, that happens, especially after holiday weekends. It wouldn't be unusual at all for me to get out of bed tomorrow, get dressed to go to work, only to realize that I only had four days to work this week.

But, no, it seems to just be a matter of the students being gone. The population of the Boston metropolitan area swells when college is in session, and although folks have been trickling out of town throughout May, the end of that month is when they really abandon us with a vengeance. It made this morning seem a little freaky - although not quite surreal, like when everyone tucks in in their apartments after a heavy snowfall and you can walk down the middle of the street for a mile without seeing anybody. On a more practical note, it means that Gertie's suddenly got more free time to hang around.

Not a whole lot more - the campus doesn't get totally abandoned during the summer; there's still plenty of graduate students and undergrads around, and summer programs. They just don't need quite so many campus police officers in any given shift, so Gertie gets fewer shifts. She's using the reduced time to take classes - she thinks she'll have enough credits for a degree in criminology by the end of the fall term - and pick up a few shifts as a security/information desk person at some of the buildings up by MIT. She's keeping about as busy, actually, but more of it's being shifted to daylight hours, so it means we'll probably be hanging out together at home more often for a while.

While she's attending to that, I'm getting some other stuff done. My jury duty from April got pushed back a month and a half when I wrote and explained that Ayer wasn't going to work for me; that's next Friday. What I'd really like is to go, get told that they won't be needing any jurors at around eleven, buy some standing room or other walk-up tickets at Fenway during the afternoon, and then kill the time in between by watching a matinee of Cars. That would just rock all.

I'm also looking at going back to Montreal for Fantasia this summer. I had a lot of fun last year, but Alex is being kind of weird about it, going on about how it's something I did with my last boyfriend, so he's worried that it'll be all "we should do this, since Chet and I had so much fun" or "ooh, Chet and I really liked that restaurant". I get that, but we only did that the one year; that just makes it a thing I did with Chet, not a Chet-and-me thing. Besides, if I had to swear off everything I did with my exes, Alex wouldn't be getting laid very much, would he? That wouldn't be very convincing logic.

The headache is trying to get a passport. Bad enough I waited until I was fairly sure I'd be going back north this summer, so I had to drop the extra $60 to get expedited service, but the guy at the post office got nosy about why someone would change her name from "Michelle Garber" to "Martina Hart". Sure, you can drop "it's none of your damn business" on them, but having "aliases" other than a maiden name seems to make things go slowly.

Too bad the guys at the FBI couldn't help, but by the time everything went through the right channels to get from them to whoever handles these things in the Department of State, it would probably be too late to do any good.

-Marti

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Note: This blog is a work of fantasy; all characters are either ficticious or used ficticiously. The author may be contacted at JaySeaver@comcast.net