When the DC Metro works, it works very well.  When it doesn’t, well, like any other complicated piece of machinery it tends to fail rather spectacularly.

Friday’s commute home started rather normally – I lucked into running directly on to my first train, which is usually a sign that I’ll get home a full five minutes sooner than usual – whooopeeee. Then I manage to get my connection seamlessly as well (can we hope to be home by 20 after five, rather than the usual 30?  Dream big, kid).  Then my train… just sits for a bit at Metro Center, getting more and more full by the passing minute (she who snagged a seat sits and reads Mrs. Astor Regrets* and tries not to feel smug).

At Dupont Circle, we sit again.  And sit.  And then the train driver tells us that, due to a track problem, this particular train won’t probably move for a while.

An HOUR, in fact.

At this point, I make a fast check of my watch and hurl myself off the train as fast as the sardine-packed humanity will allow.  Dupont Circle has an escalator so long it has been known to give my friend Alicia vertigo, and by the time I reach the top of it, I have lined up Mobile Wife Rescue Unit 1 to get me – as long as I can get myself further north than my current position, which would be a real pain to get into and out of at rush hour.  I see a couple of older gentlemen getting into a taxi and ask if they are going north by any chance.  They are, they agree to share their cab with me (sometimes, looking like a dumb blonde can be an asset), and off we go to Bethesda, where John picks me up and takes me home.

*This book is, well – it’s kind of a mess.  The first couple of chapters make the whole point of the book several times – that the aging Brooke Astor was ripped off by her son, that families are still whacko no matter how much money is involved, and that Brooke Astor was a rather complicated person (all huge surprises, you will no doubt agree).  Then the meat of the book starts to bounce back and forth in time, relating anecdotes in an almost random manner that don’t create a very clear or cogent picture of the people involved or how they all converged in a Manhattan courthouse to figure out how a very wealthy woman ended up living in squalor and who should be responsible for her.  It’s as if the writer did a few magazine articles, then decided to write a book and used the magazine articles as her first few chapters, without tailoring them to fit the longer work.  As a result, this book is work for the reader, which is too bad, because it is an interesting story.