I should preface this entry by stating that Portland’s Tri-Met transit system is still among the finest public transportation networks in the country. That is, if I can trust the comments I hear from bus-traveling visitors to our fair, soggy city, and I suspect I can. Your average grumpy commuter from out of town isn’t likely to lie about something like that if his home-town transit system is actually superior to ours. That said, I take great exception to how they handled this particular holiday.

Let’s run through the timeline of my morning:

7:55am: Leave the house with plenty of time to catch the 8:12am #9 downtown on the holiday schedule.

8:22am: Board the #9. Grumble under breath.

8:29am: After a surprisingly brief trek downtown, get off the #9 just in time to see the #35 leave the stop on the next block.

8:30am: Confirm that the transit mall screen schedule and the schedule on my Treo agree that the #35 leaves that stop at quarter ’til the hour, once an hour.

9:00am: Board the #35. The bus driver informs me that, yes, Tri-Met is on holiday schedule today except for the #35, which is running on its normal weekday schedule.

Excuse me, what? Has somebody gone utterly mad? How in the name of the seven lower hells is anyone expected to plan their commute if we’re just picking and choosing which lines to run on which schedule? It should not have taken me the better part of ninety minutes to get to work this morning, not when I was out the door well in advance of the time I needed to be. This is nonsense.

Shame on you, Tri-Met.

I’ve felt under the weather for most of this week, for various reasons. (I still think that’s an awfully silly phrase. Aren’t we all under the weather, technically speaking? Unless you’re an astronaut or riding in a large passenger jet, that is.)

This condition, whatever the hell it was, has put a severe damper on my desire to sit down at a keyboard and crank out lots of readable text. That’s a shame, too, ’cause I have stuff I want to say. I even have draft versions queued up for your future enjoyment. How scary is that? Nevermind the precisely fourteen screencaps I posted days ago in the gallery for the next Mai Otome recap on the anime site.

Luckily for us all, I think I’m finally getting over… whatever the hell it was. I don’t feel like I need to remain tethered to my bed and within close proximity to a bathroom any longer. Whew. Now I need to ramp (carefully, mind you) back up to normal life speed…

You know, I had plans for my evening. Among them were a couple of postings, one here and one on the anime site. But before I dove into that I caught up on a couple of website reads, one of which sent me looking at my own site’s stats and then on the hunt for a way to stop people from hotlinking my image content.

It turns out that a few complete losers on such loser-magnet sites as MySpace and Xanga (I’m not going to dignify their services by linking) found that they could hotlink my gallery content as backgrounds and other incidental images on their own profile pages. This required immediate action. Unfortunately, even with the aid of a snarky image provided by a concerned citizen, the process of locking things down to my satisfaction took almost the entire night. Part of the problem is that Gallery2‘s URL rewrite feature doesn’t provide a way to redirect to a static image. I can block hotlinking there, but I have no control over how it’s done. Imagine my frustration, eh? At least anyone who tries to hotlink content outside of the gallery will be punished appropriately, while in-gallery content will just disappear entirely. That must count for something.

So if you come back tomorrow, maybe there’ll be content worth reading. Right now I just want to at least attempt some relaxation, if not actual decent sleep. Anything’s possible, eh?

I don’t know what it was I ate, or if it was a combination of things I ate and things that happened, but I woke up with queasy innards and no strength this morning. I’ve spent most of the day so far (it’s almost 2pm as I write this) in bed, with occasional bouts of hopping online to write emails and read stuff.

That’s right, not only do I have a difficult time getting to sleep but I also have a digestive system that seems to enjoy making my life truly unpleasant on an occasional (but still too frequent) basis. Am I a catch or what? Ladies, don’t all rush me at once. Heh.

Now, however, I’m showered and dressed and must go forage for foodstuffs, ’cause no matter how upset my body may be, it’s also absolutely craving decent nourishment. Since I haven’t exactly been a frequent shopper lately (bad roomie, no biscuit… literally) the cupboards are surprisingly bare of simple, basic foodstuffs I can put together without relying on (nonexistent) cooking skills. Whoops. My paycheck is only a few days away, right?