tales from timbuktu

2006-05-05 - 3:12 p.m.

Yikes.

Contractor hell.

I picked N up last night from her friend K's house -- they were studying chemistry together. I ended up spending rather a long time there, since K's parents wanted to play all the music they'd written and recorded together for me. It was nice, actually, but it's a kind of music I don't really have much interest in -- sort of reggae/singing/playing with west african musicians. It sounds fine but it just doesn't grab me.

I guess I really am all about the smarty pants lyric.

Anyway, I was there until I received a frenzied call from home because K (my K) couldn't make the printer work and M had left her camera at school (or possibly lost it!) and she had to download all these pictures and print them out and make up her 8th grade box for the yearbook that night or else it would be too late and she would not get into the yearbook at all!

So we left. N called home to reassure her that threats like that are often made but not usually kept, which seemed to relieve her, but in fact I met the yearbook teacher today and she was really not very nice. Why do people who are not fundamentally very nice go into teaching? It mystifies me.

Meanwhile K was tearing his hair out over the badness of the printer.

But anyway, when N and I got into the car I said something about how I'd wanted to leave earlier, but hadn't wanted to be rude and not listen to the music.
"Is that why you were talking to K's mother for an hour?"
"Well, that, and I wanted to find out if she knew anything about getting extra time on exams, but she didn't"
"At first we were just talking -- well, we'd been studying until you came, but then we were just talking, and then we started talking about solubility, and then we started studying solubility rules again!"

The poor creature has lost her mind, but in a good way. We got home and K had fixed the printer and we figured out that M's camera had to be in her locker at school and N helped her start printing out the pictures that she did have and then N had the bright idea that she should make a tape of herself reciting the solubility rules and she should listen to it as she fell asleep.

So she did.

And now I've got to start calling around to storage places, and packing up all our earthly goods so that we can make our house look like it's a perfectly adequate space for a family of 4 or 6. Right now it looks like it's a perfectly adequate home for one of those insane people you always hear about who die and leave houses with tiny trails between heaps of newspapers and balls of string and papers brought home by children from school.

Jesus help me.

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