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Getting back into shape
Aug. 2nd, 2009 03:45 amThe world trip was good for me, if not my bank balance.
I'm at my lowest weight for a decade now. All those alternate days of walking around sprawling cities and eating airline food have paid off. I'm not getting much exercise now I'm back at work, but I've consciously tried to cut back on food, and there's less of me every day. I'm punching new holes in my belts.
The credit card bills for the trip are beginning to come in. Full of odd names and odd amounts. I spent a few hundred dollars somewhere on Madison Avenue, and I'm blowed if I know what it was for. The external hard drive I bought near Times Square was probably overpriced, but I urgently needed some external storage at that point, and I wasn't quibbling too hard. The Air only has 80GB of its own, and when you start taking lots of photographs, soon you get to a point where you can't add any more.
Plus the usual dinners and side trips and stuff. The car rental in DC was about twice as much as I'd ordered, but I told them at the counter to tick all the insurance boxes, so that was probably the extra cost.
Oh well. Travel is expensive, compared to staying at home and eating corn flakes.
I've found an error in the spreadsheet I use for recording my taxidriving income. The owner owes me a lot less than I'd previously thought, though there's still several thousand in worker's compensation payments owing.
I'm almost done paying off my back tax, and I'm steadily generating income through my regular shifts. I'm not making as much money as I used to at my peak, but there are four major factors in this:
1. There are more cabs on the road now. More cabs means more competition for work. This makes for a better service to the cab-travelling public, but is tough on individual cabbies. The government doesn't really care how many taxi licences they issue. From their point of view, each one means more income, and fewer complaints about shortages of taxis. But each new licence makes it that much harder for all cabbies to turn a profit, and although there are more cabs on the road at peak times, what nobody seems to notice are that cabbies spend more time idle on ranks in between passengers.
2. I don't drive six nights a week. Time was that I'd drive a double shift on Monday, regular night shifts Tuesday to Friday, work until dawn on Saturday night, and then fall into bed exhausted on Sunday morning. This was insane (but not uncommon in the cab industry), so I cut out the Mondays.
3. I don't drive weekends. Saturday nights are the best shifts for cabbies, but when I analysed my life and worked out that my weekends were largely spent asleep, and that the rest of the family had to tip-toe around the house on their days off, I dropped Saturdays and took up Mondays again - just a regular shift instead of a double.
4. I'm pickier about who I pick up. If the drunks are getting ratty and the computer screen is alive with reports of taxidrivers hitting their panic buttons, I'll gas up the car and go home. Some nights seem to attract dickheads. I've also learnt to wave off those who are staggering drunk, or who want to eat their greasy late-night pizza slices in my clean cab, or who just look downright dodgy. Nor do I go chasing radio work all over town - sure, I might get more fares, but I also get more stress when I find nobody at the pick-up point, which happens far too often at peak times.
Touch wood, I'll get everything sorted out before October, when I want to do another world trip, this time with the focus on a couple of weeks driving around the south and mid-west of the USA.
I'm at my lowest weight for a decade now. All those alternate days of walking around sprawling cities and eating airline food have paid off. I'm not getting much exercise now I'm back at work, but I've consciously tried to cut back on food, and there's less of me every day. I'm punching new holes in my belts.
The credit card bills for the trip are beginning to come in. Full of odd names and odd amounts. I spent a few hundred dollars somewhere on Madison Avenue, and I'm blowed if I know what it was for. The external hard drive I bought near Times Square was probably overpriced, but I urgently needed some external storage at that point, and I wasn't quibbling too hard. The Air only has 80GB of its own, and when you start taking lots of photographs, soon you get to a point where you can't add any more.
Plus the usual dinners and side trips and stuff. The car rental in DC was about twice as much as I'd ordered, but I told them at the counter to tick all the insurance boxes, so that was probably the extra cost.
Oh well. Travel is expensive, compared to staying at home and eating corn flakes.
I've found an error in the spreadsheet I use for recording my taxidriving income. The owner owes me a lot less than I'd previously thought, though there's still several thousand in worker's compensation payments owing.
I'm almost done paying off my back tax, and I'm steadily generating income through my regular shifts. I'm not making as much money as I used to at my peak, but there are four major factors in this:
1. There are more cabs on the road now. More cabs means more competition for work. This makes for a better service to the cab-travelling public, but is tough on individual cabbies. The government doesn't really care how many taxi licences they issue. From their point of view, each one means more income, and fewer complaints about shortages of taxis. But each new licence makes it that much harder for all cabbies to turn a profit, and although there are more cabs on the road at peak times, what nobody seems to notice are that cabbies spend more time idle on ranks in between passengers.
2. I don't drive six nights a week. Time was that I'd drive a double shift on Monday, regular night shifts Tuesday to Friday, work until dawn on Saturday night, and then fall into bed exhausted on Sunday morning. This was insane (but not uncommon in the cab industry), so I cut out the Mondays.
3. I don't drive weekends. Saturday nights are the best shifts for cabbies, but when I analysed my life and worked out that my weekends were largely spent asleep, and that the rest of the family had to tip-toe around the house on their days off, I dropped Saturdays and took up Mondays again - just a regular shift instead of a double.
4. I'm pickier about who I pick up. If the drunks are getting ratty and the computer screen is alive with reports of taxidrivers hitting their panic buttons, I'll gas up the car and go home. Some nights seem to attract dickheads. I've also learnt to wave off those who are staggering drunk, or who want to eat their greasy late-night pizza slices in my clean cab, or who just look downright dodgy. Nor do I go chasing radio work all over town - sure, I might get more fares, but I also get more stress when I find nobody at the pick-up point, which happens far too often at peak times.
Touch wood, I'll get everything sorted out before October, when I want to do another world trip, this time with the focus on a couple of weeks driving around the south and mid-west of the USA.
