Despite the balmy weather we had on Monday, it was only a matter of time before we had another good dumping of snow. Ten to fifteen centimetres later, I’m feeling like mother nature is thumbing her nose at us. Who can argue with her?

As I was getting ready for work, my mother expressed a lot of concerned about me being on the roads in these conditions. “Can’t you work from home?” Well, technically yes, I could have, but I’ve got some documents that I’m working on that are stuck on my hard drive and would be unavailable from home because all I can do is log onto the Unix servers. Of course, I didn’t tell her all that, but I condensed it to something clear and concise without getting into unnecessary technical jargon.

“No.”

Well, that didn’t do anything to ease her mind, so I told her that I’d just take the bus. From the look in her eyes, you would have thought that I was being sent off to die. I almost bought into it, too. I was going to call into work and say, “I can’t come in to the office today because I want to avoid sure death.” Well, hey, this is Canada. I told my mother, “This isn’t the first snow storm I’ve had to commute through.” Seriously.

So yeah, I’ve forgotten what it’s like to take the bus during the morning peak hours. Since I usually drive to the subway station, I’ve usually had to skip the bits involving overcrowding. When the TTC announced that it was increasing service on the 133, I thought, “are you kidding? That’s packed?” Well, by the time the 133 reaches my area is not as crowded but later on the route I was surprised by how many people there were. I guess it was a good thing that service was increased.

I sat down between this school kid and this woman who had a horrid loud gaudy ringtone. I took a moment to think bout how bad it was, but in the process I was hit by a wall of nasty morning breath. Yes, morning breath is a fact of life, but if you have to go out, have some decency and try to freshen up a little bit, you know? Luckily she wasn’t breathing directly at me, but she might as well have been doing so: I’m sure it would’ve been just as potent from a few farther feet away. Every time I heard her ringtone, I surreptitiously took a good breath inward in the hopes that I wouldn’t have to subject myself to her nastiness. Mercifully her conversations were rather short.

I miss driving. Driving to the station shaves half an hour off my commute time. At least, when I move I’ll be sufficiently close enough to the subway that I won’t have to drive–I don’t mind the subway at all. Meanwhile, unless a better route somehow becomes available from my current place, I’m going to keep doing driving in. A slow drive vs. a hygienically challenged woman? Hmm…next time I’m not going to let a little snow stop me.