Free stuff!

One of the few economic advantages of going back to school is that people seem much more inclined to give you stuff for free. I can get MS Office for free. I can get legal counseling for free (emotional counseling, too, but I'm hoping it doesn't come to that). There's always some free entertainment going on at campus. One of the best freebies is that I get to ride mass transit for free. Really! Not discounted; totally free. This is a big deal for someone who grew up in an area where public transportation was pretty much the only viable option for getting around.

Today, I rode in to work on the bus. The bus takes the same route I would drive and does it in about the same amount of time. Granted there is a mile on either end getting from the closest stops to my endpoints but, I can just add another mile or so in there and it counts as my morning run. It's still less efficient time-wise than driving in, but it does enable running home from work (running both ways is 17 miles, which is way more than I want to do every day).

Getting from work to school is a bit more problematic. There are multiple transfers involved. The bus route takes an hour whereas I can drive it in 30-40 minutes. At least in that case it is truly door-door service, so I could bring something to read and recover a good bit of the time. The rub would be getting from school to home. It would mean getting home pretty late though, again, I could use the time to read which is obviously not an option if I'm driving.