Wash, rinse, repeat.

I left the Subaru at the garagiste to change the oil and filters and have the winter tires put on. They supplied me with a courtesy car which I drove to the university, having wisely remembered to remove my parking sticker first so I could hang it from the blue Volvo’s rearview mirror. The items I wanted from the library were not there, so I headed to the bookstore instead to purchase a gift for a friend, and ended up buying yet another novel to add to the ever-growing pile next to my bed.

The people involved in the Burmese border project (they are teaching English to the children of illegal immigrants) had a table set up with pretty things for sale, so I bought a jade bracelet which I will probably give away. I also got into a conversation with one of the woman involved in the project about aging parents, which left me exactly 15 minutes to find some food and eat it before meeting my 1 p.m. student.

So, after wolfing down a veggie burger and a small carton of skim milk, I proceeded to teach my students, who are actually improving, I think. They had to put up with me being totally not warmed up, burping up veggie burger and clearing my throat from the milk mucous. It wasn’t a pretty sight.

After which I drove a student home (not mine, but I took pity on her because she’d missed her bus) and then arrived back at the mechanic’s thinking my car would be ready, only to be informed that we don’t, in fact, have winter tires in storage. Apart from feeling rather stupid for not having remembered that we’d discarded our old ones last spring when we replaced them with the summer tires and not purchased new ones, I also had to make a decision about what we would replace them with.

So I still have the courtesy car, which I drove to writing group tonight, the very last one until next spring. We had a fun exercise which consisted of everyone (there were only four of us) writing a first line for a story, which we read back and copied down. Then we were to take any one of those lines and write the beginning of a story for ten minutes, after which time we passed our notebooks to the person on our left, who continued the story for another ten minutes, and then wash, rinse and repeat. Then we read them back. It was interesting to see how the characters changed in some of them.

Janice also presented me with a mini-bottle of Grand Marnier for not having missed a single session this semester. I told her I would definitely spend it all in one place.

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