It Was a Thursday

Call it a clan, call it a net­work, call it a tribe, call it a fam­i­ly. What­ev­er you call it, who­ev­er you are, you need one.
–Jane Howard

On my way to class today, the vehi­cles trav­el­ing in front of me on I‑75 sud­den­ly slammed on their brakes. For­tu­nate­ly, nobody hit any­one, but I soon saw what inspired the near-acci­dents. The inter­state pass­es over a sur­face street there (I’m not sure which one, but we were just north of the south 120 loop). A man was stand­ing on the side of the road next to a car, toss­ing some kind of ropes over the side. He seemed to be prepar­ing to jump or climb down for some reason.

I called 911 because I could­n’t imag­ine any good rea­son for the fel­low to be doing that. I’m still ter­ri­bly curi­ous as to what was going on. I took a dif­fer­ent route home to avoid some of the north­bound traf­fic, so I did­n’t dri­ve by there again. Clark Howard was on WSB, and I did­n’t hear any traf­fic reports while I was in the car.

Katie is absolute­ly fas­ci­nat­ed by the pack­ing mate­ri­als from the Calvert cur­ricu­lum deliv­ery we just received. I have no idea why, but she seems to be enjoy­ing tear­ing them apart. I’m all excited—three big box­es of books and school sup­plies! I fig­ure I should let her open box­es at her own pace, though. I’m try­ing to be patient. I’m not very good at that.

Okay, we went through all the box­es. Love­ly fun things, brand new text­books and fresh paper and art sup­plies and lan­guage tapes, oh my!

The girl is extreme­ly punchy for some rea­son. She’s much perki­er now that she’s more phys­i­cal­ly active again—maybe she’s over­dos­ing on endor­phins or some­thing. The mar­tial arts stu­dio was­n’t able to find any uni­form pants small enough for her—the small­est on hand did­n’t begin to touch her waist or hips. She’s wear­ing black com­fy pants she got as a Christ­mas gift instead. I just noticed that she “hemmed” the pants with safe­ty pins! I real­ize that hem­ming should be a fair­ly sim­ple task, but I don’t sew.

One of the “tra­di­tion­al” (younger) stu­dents in my speech class is attempt­ing to con­vince the pro­fes­sor to let her turn in papers instead of giv­ing speech­es, or just do a speech in front of him instead of the whole class. That def­i­nite­ly clas­si­fies as “miss­ing the point.” The poor kid is absolute­ly ter­ri­fied, though. 

Some­one just called me back from Pal­mOne again, say­ing that oh, NOW they can send me anoth­er refur­bished M130 before I send mine back. Sor­ry, that isn’t good enough any­more. They’ve had four chances to get this right, and they’ve failed. I don’t want anoth­er refur­bished unit. I want a mod­el that isn’t a lemon!

I’m fin­ish­ing this after a hia­tus. The girl is even punchi­er now, after two hours of activ­i­ty. She’s just ran­dom­ly gig­gling. Well, at least she isn’t in one of those angsty teen moods.

I think I’m going to bed now.