The day was beautiful and I was wearing a hat and had dutifully slathered SPF 50 sunscreen on my face, but had not put it anywhere else, and ended up getting a nice burn on my shoulders, to which I administered aloe vera gel as soon as I got home. I think I’ll live.

The second day of the strike everyone was still in pretty good spirits. I walked with a woman I know who used to work in the business office but is now in the library, she has a son who went to school with my son, and we got caught up on our lives more or less, mostly concerning our kids, because that’s what mothers talk about. I also spent several hours standing chatting with the part-time faculty union rep, who is an extremely interesting character in and of himself, and we covered most topics of the known universe.

The social sciences secretary stopped to talk with us for a while. She claimed that the administration could probably manage fine without the staff for the month of July (they have enough students working on campus and enough managers to keep the basic systems running), but once August hits and students try to register online for their fall courses, the shit will hit the fan. Apparently the program the university uses for preregistration is stupid and won’t take into account advanced standing in credits obtained at CEGEP or other institutions of learning. It will just spit back a student’s request for courses with a note that he needs certain prerequisites and doesn’t have them. This prompts the student to fire off an email to the department secretary who then fixes everything for him.

Except that the department secretaries will be on the picket line, not answering email. The administration doesn’t know what to do, they can’t override the system to fix things, and in the meantime the emails will be piling up and the students will be getting irate. At that point, a settlement has to be found or there will be no reason for students to come to school in September.

After standing in the sun, getting burnt, I wandered with the union rep over to the strike HQ (which is in the same place as last time, the old store behind the feedstore elevators), used the toilet, scarfed some fruit, and then continued on my merry way, first to the pharmacy, then home.

After supper, Hubby prevailed upon me to drive him (he had had a few scotches before the glass of red wine with dinner) to the stereo store where he dropped off a turntable to be serviced and picked up a cartridge for our system. He’s gotten back into playing LP’s (and we do have some great ones, I must admit). This is a very high-end shop we were in with extremely expensive equipment. I was mesmerized by a TV playing The Fifth Element (actually, any TV playing anything will mesmerize me, which is one reason I stay away from them in general), so I didn’t really mind that the guy gave my husband the sales spiel on all the different products. But it was nice to get out of there and go home.

Then we convinced my daughter’s friend Ed to come over with the cookies he had baked earlier that day. He had called me in the afternoon, asking if I could come and give his car a boost since it wouldn’t start. When he described the situation, though (his car radio and lights still worked), it didn’t sound like his battery was dead at all. He ended up calling his Uncle Mike who scraped corrosion off the contacts, and the machine worked like new. This meant he could go to the grocery store and buy flour to make chocolate-chip cookies (I had suggested Rice Krispie squares, since he had all the ingredients for those).

So he came over with a basket of goodies, I made a couple of pots of herbal tisane, and we sat around munching and slurping until midnight, when he decided it was time to go home.

So far today I have sat around in my bathrobe, failing at the Friday NYTimes crossword puzzle. It’s really hard! The conductor of the orchestra phoned in a panic because he had lost page 14 of the second violin part, so I emailed a pdf to him, which he promptly deleted, so I had to do it again. Some people are smart in other ways, we must remember this.

I’m going to try to get Little Princess interested in doing something. I can’t stay in all day now, can I?