commuter rail

The West Medford commuter rail station isn't exactly a station. It's more of a whistle stop. The early morning train only stops there when passengers are waiting on the platform. I used to worry about where I should stand, but a man in scrubs always gets there before me and stands there looking like he knows what's going on. Sometimes another man sprints (I think from Medford Square, though maybe he just lives on the next block) as the train is approaching, and jumps over the fence to join us where we wait. If he went around by the path, he'd miss the train and have to wait an hour.

A person cannot buy a ticket in West Medford. If I wanted to buy a monthly pass, I could order it online, and they'd mail it to me. I buy my tickets on the train. They're the standard price, if one gets them on the train after getting on at a station with no ticket office, or when the office is closed. A round-trip ticket is exactly twice the price of a one-way ticket to the same place (there's no discount for saving the conductor's time on the way back.) I learned something surprising after buying a round-trip ticket.
"Valid for round trip and family fare only on date punched. Otherwise, not good for passage."

So it turned out not to be sensible to buy round-trip tickets. If I get a ride home with a colleague, I can't use the other half of the ticket another day, it's just wasted. It's more efficient to buy tickets one at a time from the conductor, every time I get on the train. I wonder what they're trying to accomplish with this policy? Trick gullible tourists into buying round-trip tickets, throwing away half, and buying fresh tickets the next day? It's hard to believe it could be worth the cost in goodwill.

fatigue failure

This is a couch, so talking about "fatigue mode failure" suggests it fell apart because I came home from the airport and flopped down on it, exclaiming how tired I was. That's not quite the mechanism. For those of you who know about the failure mode of my old bed, it might have been something like that...only somewhat less dramatic.

This is a couch I've had since the summer of 1992, so it might simply have reached the end of its useful life. I don't know. This End Up makes furniture that looks more or less like this
http://www.thisendup.com/catalog.htm/1/42.htm , only mine has blue cushions.
It seems like it should be pretty sturdy, but I haven't been at all gentle with it. It's a couch, not a lamp, and I don't like the idea that I should *need* to be gentle with it.

The couch cushions are still intact, and so are the long boards supporting the cushions. The problem is with the wooden cross-braces supporting those long boards. Either the wood of the brace is splintering, or the nails holding the front of the brace to the inner-front of the couch frame are pulling out (incidentally chewing up a strip of the couch frame.) It's probably fixable. The problem is that *I* am not capable of fixing it.