LiveJournal won't finish loading on the cell data connection, and my pattern has always been to blog in out of the way places (Advogato, whose admins gave me a cookie I saved in a text file when I lost my login info, use.perl.org, ...).

I'm rolling in to Davis, CA, where a bunch of exceedingly tiny houses in a row are connected via some duct-like overhanging facade in the front. They look like they might have a living room with a bed nook jutting out. Leaving, there are electric third rail warning lines.

I followed the shore line down to Amtrak Emeryville after essentially riding to Rebecca's boathouse, then wound up on the wrong side of the tracks, fobbling down a few blocks trying to get around a mysterious one way street, then a street that only dumps into a shopping complex parking garage, then heads towards freeway interchange before turning around and spotting a ped overpass on the GPS. It has stairs and elevators, and the elevator on the far side dropped me right where I'd be boarding after removing protrusions from the bicycle. The Richmond station is another case of popping out of an elevator and finding yourself on the train platform.

As a kid, I at some point became aware of bicycle of bicycles without kickstands. Maybe it was in the small-town Schwinn dealer. I don't know. It seemed alien and impragmatic even though my cousins and I would often pick our bikes up from the ground crashing them, or perhaps because of that. The bike comes up off of the ground because you wiped out, and picking it back up is associated with doing a quick mental injury check.

The Amtrak baggage dude who was being super-helpful and asked me if I had ever done that before -- package a bike into an Amtrak bike box. "No, but I have packed it into my own bag in the past when riding Amtrak". He told me yeah, they started getting serious about the bike boxes after someone's self packed bike popped a kickstand out while being handled, and the kickstand lodged in the handler's shoulder. Ouch.

There's a jackrabbit running along the tracks. We're stopped again, this time in Sacramento. There's a jackrabbit running along the tracks.

There's something about getting on a train, or getting ready for a long trip. You have to make peace with where you're leaving from. I read an article once a long time ago that attempted to to answer the question of why you forget what you were doing when you go into another room to do something (or, alternatively, why sometimes old people will walk into the supermarket and the step dead as soon as they've planted foot inside). Temporary changes in context help break life up into chapter.