The route I've been taking now has too small a window-of-opportunity to switch between routes: it only takes one to be slightly late, or the other to be slightly early, to make me late. I don't like being late. Plus, why not see a slightly different part of Portland in the morning? So I remembered a couple of other routes, looked up their schedules, and said (like Tom Hanks in Cast Away) "This could work." "This" is the #17 outbound, then the #71 from Holgate to a little north of Powell.
At the start of this job back in early May, I sometimes left even earlier. I was using TriMet bus tickets at the time -- didn't yet have a monthly pass -- so to save tickets, I'd walk home from work and, a few times, walk to work. It was a 50-minute walk from my place to the office, on cool spring mornings. Plus at the time I was obsessing over the new Star Trek, so there I was walking past many, many homes remembering cool moments from that film. Not a bad commute. Still not my shortest commute -- that was the four blocks from this apartment to the TriMet offices where I worked from last October to last January -- but not bad.
I want a not-bad commute again.