“I don’t care about your kids”, I joked with the woman at the bus stop this afternoon, “I’ve got to meet my friend Andrew at the pub”. We both laughed. We had both been standing waiting patiently for the 352 to Newtown for at least ten minutes. When it finally arrived at 5.35, she had resolved to ask the driver if his was the 5.14 or the 5.35. With a frazzled look on his face, he replied his was the 5.14, but twenty minutes late.

While waiting she had told me she’d left work early just so she could catch the bus to get home to see her kids, and that’s when I made the joke. I told her, however, about the 355 which leaves from around the corner and takes only slightly longer, but might be useful in the future.

I seem to have spent the day at bus stops. I caught another bus earlier today, and watched in horror as various versions of the same bus arrived together completely full. “How can this be?”, I thought to myself. “It’s two o’clock on a Friday afternoon on one of the busiest streets in Sydney, and yet none of the buses are on time, they’re all running together, and they’re all full?” Grumble.

Aside from that, it’s been a really nice day.

I got up late this morning, chatted online briefly, read some email and wandered around for a while waiting to watch the Biden-Palin on television. The focus groups on CNN revealed an even mixture between those who thought Biden won and those who thought Palin won. But on Fox News, Palin got a 3/4 majority. I really like Fox News, as it’s reasonably entertaining to watch. However, their really obvious partisanship in the lead up to the election has forced me to change channels quite regularly. The problem with partisanship, in my view, is that worse than being a failure to adhere to independant journalisatic principles, it’s just plain boring. When you know what someone is going to say before they say it… Bring back the entertainment guys…

I popped into work for an hour or so this afternoon as part of my “handover” process for my return to work on Tuesday. Nothing seems to have changed too much from what I can see.

And then late this afternoon I caught up with Andrew for a beer and some mexican food. Beer and beans? That’s a good combination…

On returning home, I ran into a colleague at the bus stop in Newtown tonight. “You look very chilled out”, he told me.