First a Rant, Then Some Knitting

Every day (or almost every day) for the past 3-4 years I have been taking the same bus, at the same time. Most drivers are pretty good, they come on time and they leave on time. After 3-4 years I thought I knew the routine. I would get to the bus stop, which is a biggish stop, lots of suburban busses leave from this bus stop. I would stand outside and watch all the busses come, I would look at the route signs on the bus and wait for mine to come. Sometimes I would see my bus and the driver would turn off the sign. This typically would mean that either the bus driver was taking a break (which I understand and respect) or that the driver was no longer doing my route and was doing another route, or going out of service. This morning with my regular driver not on the route, I nearly missed the bus. How can this happen if I arrive at my bus stop over 20 minutes before my bus' scheduled departure? Well, what happened is that the bus driver did not turn on the route sign until he was pulling away from the bus stop! I, and another regular rider ran to try to get on the bus and the driver yelled at us for yelling at the bus and chasing it. The then tried to accuse us of not being at the bus stop and told us that we should have knocked on the bus door to find out what route he was and to get on the bus! I pay $71 per month for a service (and the MBTA wants to increase their prices). That service is the bus ride to and from work. It is not my responsibility to go knocking on every bus to find out where the driver is going. They are supposed to turn on their route signs. The driver claimed that he had no control over the route sign, and when I told him that other drivers did not have a problem with turning on the route sign before they left, he told me not to compare him to other drivers! How is it that this man has no control over when his route sign goes on, but other drivers, of this and other routes, have no problem. Also, the guy never even opened his bus door at the stop!!! WTF?!

Enough rant, onto knitting. Suddenly I have different projects for different things I am doing. Before I worked on each project on every occasion. Socks were not traveling projects for me, because the DPNs would go astray, now, however, with magic loop, socks are my commuting project (ps today I really needed my knitting to help restore some calm). Now, I understand why people like to work on socks when they are on the go, they are much smaller and much easier to carry than other projects, and with magic loop, needles don't get lost and stitches don't fall off the needles.

At home, and occasionally at knit night, I have my Season of Darkness etc sweater to work on. This isn't great for knit night, as I was reminded last night, because I keep loosing my place on the chart. At home this is a great way for me to unwind and relax. I don't find stockinette stitch to be meditative, my mind still runs on over my different stresses when I work on stockinette. This requires enough concentration that my stresses can be temporarily forgotten. This is not good for traveling though because the rows are so long and it is difficult to follow the chart while on a bus or the similar. Also carrying 2 colors of yarn make this more cumbersome to carry. I absolutely can't work on this while I am at work either.
Finally, for your consideration, I have my at work project. I am busy reading thousands of pages of tedious notes, most of which are not relevant to our case. It is only every 50 or so pages that I have to make a short note. While reading this, I need something to keep me awake, and caffeine is not enough. Fortunately I can do stockinette stitch and read at the same time, so I started the Pearl Buck Jacket from Winter 2005 IK, most of which is stockinette stitch. This is my progress on the back so far.