They don't get much more random than this....

Acts of kindness, that is.  A perfect storm of weird and wondrous, signifying very little in the grand scheme of things but making me feel pretty damn good on an otherwise dull morning.

Today is a Car Guy Day. Cameron has told us that he'd prefer we just sell his old beater van for whatever we can get for it. It's been sitting, uninsured and without plates, in our driveway ever since his mom canceled both in late June. We've taken it around the block a few times just to keep the engine from seizing and the tires from going flat, but the noises on just that block are scary. We got a random inquiry from a neighbor last month, who saw the unplated hulk, but he Carfaxed it and backed off. So the first step is to have our mechanic check it out and, maybe, help us find a buyer for it either repaired or as-is.

Meanwhile, my own car's been making some less scary but still annoying noises. On my last tire rotation, they identified both; relatively minor (at least in the past they've been), but I've put off the trip up there. Last night, though, I worked out the fire drill: I'd drop mine off, take a plate off it, have Eleanor bring me home, put the plate on the other one (highly illegal but, face it, it'll stop all but the most eagle-eyed of cops), run THAT over, have Eleanor bring me home again, and then take her truck to court at 10 this morning.

That proved to be a bit much for her, so I thought, why not walk home after dropoff one? I haven't run-run since the 5K, but the place couldn't be much further than that (almost exactly 3 miles, it turned out), so I did the one-plate switch before leaving, clocked the route out to be sure I could handle it, prayed that the slight drizzle would stop (it mostly did), dropped the key in the slot and was committed. 

Distances around here seem greater than they really are; the first leg, from Maple to Sheridan, is well under a mile and I'd barely broken a sweat at a speedwalky pace when I got within a block of the new Mickey D's on the corner. And that is when things got interesting.

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My decades of legal training spotted an oddity on the sidewalk- a tiny piece of Uniform Commercial Code lying upside down.  It was a recently written, uncashed personal check to a local church. A foot beyond it, another one. In the side street just past that, a complete slag heap of more.  In all, probably close to $1,000 in checks and ticket receipts for some sort of football-game fundraiser for a local RC church's school. 

I did what nobody else had done: I stopped and picked them all up, and went into the restaurant to caffeinate and regroup.  Then I called the school, to see if some panicked kid was having his knuckles rapped by Sister Mary Yardstick for losing them on his way to school this morning.  They knew nothing about it, but were very grateful that I'd found them.  Later today, I will assemble the mess into something marginally postal and mail it out to them. I'm half-tempted to do it anonymously, and I'll refuse any gift offered in return, but I wouldn't mind the thank you for its own sake, either.

After asking for a takeout bag to contain all this loot, I walked the rest of the way home in time to shower, get ready for work and, yes, even post this. There were tickets from that fundraiser that had already blown down Sheridan halfway to Millersport Highway, but hopefully I contained most of the potential damage to coffers and identities.

I disagree with much of their theology, and I agree with almost none of their politics, but today, it was the right thing to do.

Hop on the Bus, Gus. Or not.

Two other oddities from my adventures in Catholic littering earlier.

I mentioned that I briefly bivouacked at a McDonalds on the corner of Sheridan and Sweet Home.  It opened a few months ago, and the location is kinda weird:



If the drive-thru seems to be pointing the wrong way, or that building looks really old-school Mickey D's, it's because it is. Sometime in the 80s, I think, they closed the location and it was turned into a photo finishing lab. One oddity of the rebuild was that they kept the drive-thru window; on more than one occasion back in the 90s when I brought film over there, I'd drop it off and try to order a double cheeseburger, onion rings and a large orange drink.

Somehow, Color Tech has survived the death of non-digital photography, while still retaining the architecture. Meanwhile, Ronald must've felt a fondness for the corner, because when they tore down a United Church of Christ building that had been on that spot for decades, they built a new one on its formerly hallowed ground.

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While sitting in the new restaurant, I considered some facts unknown to me when I set out earlier. I'd seen a bit of rain along the way, and I was now holding a Whopper of a bag full of raffle tickets and checks (the final haul turned out to be just over $500), so running home was now out and I was even questioning the walk.  I thus decided to go back to the 80s again in one more respect: I checked if there was a bus running along Sheridan Drive.

This was as bizzare an effort as finding the checks on the ground in the first place.  To be kind, the NFTA website is hideous. There is absolutely no overview of the bus lines even coming close to one of the classic T or Tube or MTA system maps; to find a bus, you need to know the name of the route it travels. "Sheridan" seemed a logical guess, and, this being Buffalo, a wrong one; THAT line ends near the Amherst-Tonawanda town border, which I was on the other side of.  "Williamsville" was my only other guess among the choices (which are neither alphabetical nor geographic but tied to numbers assigned, in most cases, in the 1950s), but the Williamsville route runs mostly along Main Street and thus wasn't anywhere near where I was.

I see buses running along that major highway all the time, but there was no way of finding which one was going to, much less when, short of going outside, hoping there was a stop nearby (there was), and noting the name of the bus line that stops at it. The route is cleverly named "Hopkins," after a street it turns onto from Sheridan a good four miles down the road.  And, now armed with that information, I could view a .pdf of a perfectly 1970s timetable, informing me I'd damn best walk slow with my booty in hand because I'd still get home a good 20 minutes sooner than waiting 40 minutes for the next Number 49 to come by.

Which, it turned out, is what I did, never seeing a bus in either direction.

Other cities have smartphone apps to help you find, plan and even pay for mass transit. This one remains firmly entrenched in the latest hours of the Late Late Show; it's a wonder the buses aren't in black and white.