Busy, then rain

2004-11-10 - 9:45 a.m.

So.

Here, go read this rather incendiary statement.

And then there's this correlation of IQ scores with how the states voted.

Not sure where all this gets us, but there does seem to be something going on.

I can't even read the newspapers -- this whole thing in Falluja seems to be very ill-advised. I can't see how it's going to lead to anything but disaster.

Anyway.

Let me fill you in on some exciting life details!

Monday night I was supposed to go get a mammogram. I'm not quite sure why I let them talk me into a Monday night appointment, when it is patently impossible for me to get from Maddy's riding lesson (pt. A) to the place (pt. C) in under 30 minutes. Which I kind of had, except I had to drop Maddy off at home (pt. B), and she had fallen off a horse while doing the emergency dismount, so was in a very sad mood, and Nora was at home in a state of distress having to a) complete a map of the ancient world without access to Maddy's atlas, formerly Nora's atlas, which was at that moment residing peacefully in Maddy's locker at (pt. b.1) school. After the map, she had geometry homework, and then, worst of all, the rewrite of the essay on which she had gotten a C, shattering all confidence.

So I dumped the snivelling Maddy off, snarled at Nora to call her father and ask him where the other atlas was, and headed out into the night.

But I got a flat tire! A massive one -- it was flat three driveways from where I had run into the curb!

Thank god, I could not go to the blasted appointment. I came home, got Kevin's bike (which had air in its tires and working lights!), rode to pt. b.1, retrieved the atlas. Maddy's report card had come, and instead of the expected 7 Ds, she'd received 2 As, 2 A-s, a very nice comment from her art teacher and, sadly, a C+ in gym, ruining her chances, as I told her, from ever receiving the Nobel prize in physics.

But you can't have everything.

Nora's map was not so terrible. She had actually started a fire and done laundry, too, so by the time the triple A man came, Kevin was reading the paper in a chair by the fire, Nora was finishing her geometry by the fire, Maddy was in a somewhat cheerful mood, and there was actually leftover chinese food for dinner!

Triple A man came and went. The essay was nowhere near as hopeless as was feared. Cheer was restored!

Then yesterday, I took the car in and rode my bike to work. It did not rain. It turned out that the car needed a ton of work, but the car man had time to do it, and now it's set for the winter. The video store up the street from the car guy had the video Nora needed to watch (Romero, with Raul Julia -- it seems her Spanish class is doing a unit on El Salvador. But the past tense seems to be involved as well.) -- so I picked it up on the way home, got Maddy, and even had a car to take her to her piano lesson!

Nora stayed up until 1 with Archbishop Romero and the past tense. I kept her company knitting the front of Maddy's sweater, which I think is going to be really nice. That I am living at all now is due to a really nice muffin and a latte.

I left Nora at home this morning to skip gym and finish up with Romero. With any luck she caught the bus and got to school in time for geometry. She had to draw up four scenes from the movie, and translate the dialogue into spanish and put it over the characters' heads in little talking bubbles, and then write a five sentence description of what was going on using a certain number of verbs in the imperfect and perfect (? possibly not the correct grammatical terms) tenses. It was a huge amount of work. Now that I know how to put pictures in here, I'll try to add one -- they're actually quite hilarious. The poor archbishop is often seen in a billowy sort of caftan thing, so that he looks like a insane dervish rising up from the desert landscape. And he has no hands. And's he's often sort of tilted. And he often appears in the company of another man with a very round head and a large hat. Also with no hands.

And now I have a lot of important things to do.

The first may be to go get more coffee before I crash entirely ...

Bye.

Oh, but also -- I really should ride my bike more often. First of all, I made it up all the hills of death without walking once, which is something of a miracle considering that I haven't ridden since probably a year ago -- I think I stopped last year around the time the time changed. But also, somehow riding my bike helps to convince me that I'm a real person living in a real place. It's so nice to be outside, and it's a little bit cool, especially if you don't wear a sweater. And the leaves are turning here and there. I don't know -- there's just something really nice about it.

Maybe tomorrow, it if's not raining --

But rain is okay, too.

Bye, then.

out of print - new releases

find me! - 2008-02-12
where I've gone - 2008-02-07
Where I've gone - 2008-02-05
where I've gone - 2008-02-01
New - 2008-02-01

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