Oh Yeah, Plus We Had to Buy New Tires

I guess when it rains, it pours. While I'm happy to have my little Honda Civic, the car that reportedly Never Breaks Down and Will Run Forever, the routine maintenance can get a little pricey. I'm not sure what's worse: paying $350 when something goes wrong with the car, or paying $350 when nothing is wrong with the car. Which is what we did yesterday, just a day after the furnace guy told us that we need a new water heater.

"What would happen if we just wait for it to go?" I asked without irony.

He grinned. "Be prepared for some water on your floor."

He couldn't have come up with a better sell. One flood per lifetime is plenty.

I think I'll have to cut back on my lattes and hope one of my colleagues gets sick so I can pick up some extra hours.

Comment dit-on cela en français?

While my previous attempts at learning Swedish and Hmong have not been as successful as I had hoped (the extent of my mastery is as follows: I can say "the cat can dance" in Swedish and "teacher, I don't understand English" in Hmong), I remain optimistic that I am one of those people who can learn a foreign language effortlessly. I have absolutely no evidence to support this, but I am hopeful.

Armed with nothing but faith, I marched into my neighborhood library branch and checked out a CD series called "Learn French the Easy Way." It sounded perfect for me, because I want to speak beautiful French by my October 13 departure date, but I don't really have all that much time to dedicate to the learning between my developing online shopping habit and watching the new primetime tv shows.

Hopefully that language acquisition part of my brain will come to life and I'll soon be saying "Je prendrai du vin" just like the natives.

But My Bed is So Warm and Comfy

A couple weeks ago, my friend Laura sent out an email to a few people trying to solicit company for a band she wanted to see. They were scheduled to go on at 11pm, which means they might start by midnight.

Because 10pm, even on a weekend, is certifiably "past my bedtime," I was thankful that my mom was going to be in town so that I had an excuse for not joining in the late night festivities. I could bow out, yet still preserve the illusion that, were I free, I would certainly be the kind of fun, cool person who would go see a band at 11pm.

"Well, I didn't expect that YOU would come," Laura explained to me with a chuckle when I told her that, regretfully, I couldn't make it. "I just didn't want you to feel left out."

I felt a little slighted, that I had perhaps been pegged unfairly as the "Boring Friend."

But then again, maybe it's justified. Mark and I have been anticipating the premiere of "Studio 60" for months now, and when we saw that it came on from 9-10 tonight, we just laughed and decided no show was worth staying up that late for.

Here is the remote village in Washington state where my brother and his partner will be living for the next two years.

Mark and I will continue to live just down the block from a former meth house that is now boarded up and plastered with neon signs warning to people to stay away.

And I thought they were crazy...

Book Recommendation

I'm a little embarrassed to say that I'm finally getting around to reading this because the movie is coming out, but I'm admitting to this because you simply can't miss this book: Running with Scissors by Augusten Burroughs is the funniest book I've read since, well, anything by David Sedaris, and Burroughs has actually been compared to Sedaris in multiple reviews (my personal opinion is that Sedaris is still the superior writer, but then I worship the man). Anyway, Running with Scissors is wacky, outrageous, hilarious and just the right amount of disturbing: the perfect read.

Back to School

A real plus to teaching adult ed is that there is virtually no administrative red tape. A downside to this is that sometimes this means there is no administration, either. I was pondering this today as my closet of a classroom was packed this morning with nearly 50 confused students, who clearly hadn't uttered a word of English in a almost month, wanting to know their schedule for this fall. I had had my class list since early August, but apparently this did not mean that it had occured to our "administrative liaison" to let the students in on the secret of their fall schedule.

Fortunately I had finally bothered to figure out how to work a fax machine last spring, and I was able to eventually get some class lists faxed over to me from a teacher at the other site (who was wondering why no one has shown up yet). I read off each teacher's name and site, and then the names of the students who were supposed to be in that class. There was silence for a moment, which I took to mean comprehension. Then a return to utter chaos, as every single student descended upon these lists. Presumably, my English accent had mangled the names so effectively that we were no better off than we had been before the reading of the lists.

Day One, down.

A Labor Day, It Is

On what can pretty much be described as a whim, yesterday Mark and I ripped out the clunky, mildew-loving glass shower doors in our main bathroom. While the tear-down process was therapeutic (visions of the end of perpetually bruised shins kept me going), this morning we woke up and realized that we probably ought to have a Part II to our plan. Mark thought that a plastic tension rod as the permanent solution was tacky, so we opted for a metal rod that involved mounting hardware and a power drill. We hadn't measured the shower, so we estimated the length that the rod ought to be; turns out we were about a foot and a half off. Fortunately, we'd overestimated instead of underestimated. A hacksaw seemed to do the trick, and now I'm just waiting for the hardware to be mounted.

"How's the mounting going?" I asked Mark a few minutes ago, trying to sound cheery and casual, as though I didn't expect him to say, "I'm not sure."

"I'm not sure," was his response. Followed by, "Do we have a yardstick?"

We agreed that we did at one point have a yardstick.

We also are about to agree to make the basement bathroom our main bathroom.