Riding at the back of the bus

The bus was almost half-full this morning, and all the seats in the front half of the shady side were taken, so I went to the back, and was reminded again of the strange thing about buses here. (Edit: in Tucson, AZ).

The seats at the back are never as comfortable as the seats nearer the front. On the older buses, the front seats are fully padded, the back ones metal or plastic with thin slips of padding; on the newer ones, the thin slips of colourful plush padding are at the front and the rear seats are mere black vinyl. I doubt any of these buses are more than ten or fifteen years old.

I'm probably completely wrong, but I always wonder if this is evidence of some weird cultural blind spot left over from the days of segregation -- a conviction that something inescapable about the nature of public transport requires the back half of the bus to have inferior accommodations even though there are no longer laws requiring certain people to sit there. I know, from growing up on buses in the UK, that this isn't true. Even in the days when the back half of single-decker buses was the domain of smokers, the seats were the same all the way back.

Thursday

Still too hot. 57 photos so far this week, 38 of them barrel cactus flowers. The night-flowering cacti are taunting me.

Either I need a new bathroom scale, or the heat and its attendant hydration and appetite problems are doing really odd things to my weight. I've weighed myself at 124, 130 and 126 pounds in the last couple of weeks. Gaining or losing a few pounds is nothing new, but it doesn't usually happen that fast!

My package arrived, and my imminent-reading shelf is once more stacked with interesting things, including Simmons' Olympos. (Also, Traitor's Knot, originally scheduled for last November and ordered in March, finally got here last week.)