pedablogical

Packing the car

The car is partially packed. The remaining things (which shouldn’t get hot during the day tomorrow) are piled and ready to load at the last minute. The mail is stopped. The housesitter taken care of . . . . . . . . . The road trip is imminent.

Two Doctor’s Appointments

So tomorrow I have two doctor’s appointments. Just one apparently wouldn’t do. The first one is about swelling in my legs and feet. They’ve gone insane. Started middle of last week I think. Through some miracle I got in with my doctor tomorrow. It’s gotten to the point where it really hurts. Everything that is swollen is incredibly dry. Embarrassingly dry. I figured that I needed concrete information for her, so I measured things. Last night, my left ankle was 11.5 inches and my right was 12. This morning, they were both 10. That’s a lot of swelling. It’s no wonder it hurts. I just hope she can come up with some solution. It’s not as bad as it was a couple of weeks, around the 10th. They were about 14 inches then, but they went back down and I thought all was fine. Surely bodies are not supposed to do such things.

The second doctor’s appointment I’m just going to get in trouble because I didn’t do what I was supposed to and I don’t know if I can. That one I don’t know how I’m going to endure. I hate that I screw up so much. Really I just gave up and quite trying. Maybe if I don’t think about it I can pretend I don’t have to do it.

That’s apparently what I did after work. Since I have to show my feet to the first doctor and all… and since they’re still in horrible shape from C&W (blisters still peeling and all), I went and got a pedicure. My bloated piggies are the color of Aphrodite’s Pink Nightie. The poor guy who had to do it. It’s a miracle he didn’t vomit. All the loose skin from the blisters and whatnot. Bleh. I tipped well.

Favorite book quote for today:
“the lantern had its own little solar system of very stupid moths” (Equal Rites, p. 46)

“Writing grows out of many different purposes”

I need to come up with a revised outline and schedule for the mysterious book that I never manage to get more than a few minutes to work on every 9 months. I dug out all the books and notes last week, from a bag that I carried to Virginia at Christmas. I didn’t pull them out in Virginia, and I hadn’t pulled them out here either.

So they’re pulled out, and I’ve read through them. The problem is that I’m stuck. I need to work on writing beliefs 5–11, and I’m totally unable to think of anything useful to say. Perhaps it’s partially that #5 seems to be a wider topic, but I’m not really sure. I have read and reread the text of #5, but I can’t come up with anything. It’s so bad that I’m wondering if I should dump the entire chapter. That’s annoying though given that I currently have 8 pages of single-spaced text that DO work.

I thought that I should try to freewrite, but that didn’t get me anywhere either. I don’t know how I’m going to get past this; and I feel like I have to figure out how to get past #5 if I’m going to come up with a schedule. :(

The evil #5 states, “Writing grows out of many different purposes,” and it explains that “Writing is not just one thing. It varies in form, structure, and production process according to its audience and purpose.” Now that should be easy as hell to come up with text on. My problem is that for all the others I have included either a personal anecdote about my writing experience or a story from my teaching, and I’ll be dashed if I can think of a good anecdote for #5. And I’ll be honest, as I cast forward and look at the rest of them, stories aren’t springing to mind there either.

Maybe it’s just been too long since I taught. Surely I have stories. They just don’t seem to be handy right now, and I haven’t got a clue how to summon them forth. :( Where are the dang things hiding, and what am I going to do with #5 until I figure it out?

Terry Pratchett Audiobooks!

I’ve been at work all weekend, trying to catch up/get ahead. I’m not working hard enough. Don’t ever seem to get enough done. I used to go to the office every weekend, and I guess I need to go back to that habit if I’m going to get everything done.

I need to try to get ahead because I’m going to Virginia for the 4th and won’t be back here at NCTE World until the 10th. I’m not even sure what all to haul with me to work on. I have begun the process of planning everything else though—which mainly means I’ve made a list. Okay, a bit more, I’ve figured out what book to listen to, and that brings us to the evil that is Audible.com.

Audible.com is a fine and inexpensive option for downloading audiobooks. It worked out to be cheaper than iTunes; but they made me mad yesterday and I’m not sure about forgiving them yet. I decided to look for a new Terry Pratchett book, but I didn’t really want to figure out the reading order and all that nonsense. And what wonder! Audible had Truckers, Diggers, and Wings (The Bromeliad Trilogy) as three separate downloads. Perfect! I already owned the book—I like to have the print book to refer to when I miss something or what to reread something. I thought I was set. I entered all my info to join and pay for an exciting Audible.com membership, and the site promptly told me that I was in the wrong geographical region to buy the books and dumped me out. Apparently, American are not allowed to buy audiobooks of The Bromeliad Trilogy. :(

The only reason that I’m still speaking to Audible.com is that they didn’t charge me for that little exchange. If I had paid AND been told that I couldn’t get those books which look perfectly available when you do a search on their site, someone would have been getting quite an inbox-load of invective on Monday morning.

Unfortunately, that meant that I still had to figure out the reading order and whatnot to find a Pratchett book for the trip. So I googled about, remembered that the L-Space Web had been recommended to me once before, and found there the Discworld Reading Order Guides. After looking up blurbs on the various books labeled as Starter Novels, as well as any others that caught my fancy.

I like the character Death, and seriously considered going with Mort or Thief of Time. But the plots of neither caught my interest.

I ended up going with the first three witches books (Equal Rites, Wyrd Sisters, and Witches Abroad). I’ve done Wee Free Men and A Hat Full of Sky, which show up at the end of the witches line on the chart, and also The Amazing Maurice, which the chart claims has “minor plot links” (though I don’t know what they’d be). I liked Granny Weatherwax in what I’ve read, so I decided to gamble on her rather than Death. I won’t get through all three of them on the trip, but it’s a good 10–11 hours, and the book claim to be 8, 10.5, and 8.5 hours each.

Okay, so that’s more than I need, but things should be done in threes. Besides, I’ve already started listening to Equal Rites, though I don’t have the print copy yet, so I don’t really know how far along I am. The books have a different narrator from the Wee Free Men and A Hat Full of Sky, so I’m still trying to get used to her. I think I prefer Stephen Briggs’ Granny Weatherwax to Ms. Imrie’s; and I have no idea who is doing the Death voice on this recording, but it just feels wrong, perhaps because it’s such an interruption from Imrie’s voices.

So the books are generally out of the way for the trip (if you will count that I’ve ordered the paperbacks and just have to put them in the car when they arrive Wednesday). Now I just need to do everything else for the Vue’s first road trip.

Doublespeak Fun

Virginia Tech student charged in planting of explosive device – Roanoke.com: “They found an explosive device containing gunpowder and ball bearings, police said. No one was injured, and the device was rendered safe by the state police bomb squad.”

“rendered safe” = they blew it up

More Vue

Because you may not have seen enough pictures of my car yet, here are pics that show the cross-bars I got added to the roof rack and the side and back
window deflectors that were added. You’ll especially love the first one, from the
inside of the car that proves these are quality Saturn parts :)

Also two random flowers blooming in my yard because I was out there anyway and they
were pretty.

Things Not Done

I seem to be not going anything that I should be doing. I should probably be in bed, for instance. But instead, I’m sitting here looking for solutions that don’t seem to be online. I do have a PDF index building in the background, which is my excuse for not being gone yet.

Of course, that’s not all.

I should have loaded my stuff into the new car, but it’s still sitting in boxes in the garage. I can’t figure out the right place to put anything. And some things don’t seem like they can go in the new car. Others, well, I’m trying to decide if they SHOULD be in the car. So I’m not doing anything.

And I’m supposed to be writing a journal for something, but I can’t make myself start. I just put it off indefinitely. It’s just too impossible anyway, and I don’t want to write what other people want.

I should be repairing all the damage the Microsoft caused with their latest IE patches; but I don’t feel like figuring out the shockwave scripts.

I should be loading the dishwasher and tidying the kitchen. I never seem to get things where they belong.

I should be cleaning up the mess of boxes and nonsense sitting around; but everything feels so scattered about and beyond me.

I should be doing so many things.
I can’t seem to do any of them.
Maybe I just want things I can’t ever have.
I know some things are impossible
But that doesn’t make me stop wanting them
Or tell me how to deal with not having them.
So instead I do nothing.
And hope that maybe things will change.

From the world of things that just seem wrong…

eSchool News online – Bias-busting tech keeps kids focused—”A handheld computer with software that randomly selects students’ names is an effective tool for making sure students pay attention and do their homework, an education researcher has found. Originally intended to increase class participation and eliminate any bias in how teachers call on students for discussion, the solution also was found to increase students’ attentiveness and boost their chances of success.”

An unplanned day

After a hellish week of what folks of my type might call “women’s issues,” my plan for today was to get get the oil in my car changed at 10 and have them look at the leak near the sun roof. It looked like some rubber was loose and needed glued back down. Next, I was going to pick up my prescriptions, go by the grocery store, and be home by mid-afternoon. It didn’t really work out that way.

Instead, I arrived at my dear Saturn dealer’s and found that my car needed one of its super maintenance visits: rotate the tires, new spark plugs, oil, new air filters, etc., etc. Great. Not good enough? $300+ estimate and 4.5 hours to do the work. Okay, fine. I was planning on looking at a Vue, trying to get a test drive, and finding out how to sign up for a hybrid so that I might get one of the first ones.

The test drive was easy. They let me take a car that the business manager had been driving (a front-wheel drive, 4-cylinder green one) and do whatever I wanted. It helps to always go to the same place for my maintenance. They didn’t even ask to see my driver’s license before setting me free in their car. I drove down to the nearest interstate entrance, drove it on the highway, back through town to my house, tested it in the garage (to make sure it fit properly), played around with parking it in the movie theater lot behind the Saturn dealer, and back into the dealer’s lot. I had it for 45 minutes (and they said I could take an hour, so I was quite the good girl).

At that point, I sat down to do a little busy work in the waiting area. About 30 minutes or so after settling in, one of the salespersons, Dale, was finished with the previous customer and chatted with me about the options. I explained that I wanted a hybrid, etc. After some quizzing of my habits though, he said that I wouldn’t really save money on the hybrid since they’re more expensive and I didn’t do enough driving to benefit from the hybridity. Hmm. Okay, I figure I have time to think about all this. I wasn’t planning to do anything today anyway.

About 30 minutes after that, the service person tells me that the sun roof has rusted out. I identified the right place, but not the right cause. Cost? Almost $500. That was when I started in on the phone calls. It was pouring rain, so I couldn’t go outside. Instead, I closed myself up in the kiddie playroom and called my mom for advice. We decided that I needed to ask the salesperson about trade-in value with and without the fix. Salesguy at this point is eating lunch, so I tell him when he’s done that I need to chat with him again.

I explain the situation to him once he finishes his pizza, and he goes off to figure out the trade-in value. It had stopped raining; so I went outside and called my brother for advice on what I should do and what I should go for: all-wheel drive 6-cylinder OR front-wheel drive 4-cylinder. He said the AWD, since if I was in Virginia at Christmas and needed to get back to Illinois, I’d need the more capable snow car. This is not, of course, the way that I usually make decisions. Usually I would do all this research myself so that I could make my own decision.

Go back into the dealer. They came up with a kind $1700, not bad for a 10-year-old car, and they did take into account the maintenance underway (new plugs, etc.). The salesguy explained that fixing the roof was not going to increase the value $500. So essentially I was going to lose money. Sigh. That was when I realized that I was buying a new car and soon. You can’t run around with a rain roof, and if I ruined the top of the car, its trade-in value would plummet.

So we went through the available cars on the lot. The AWD, 6-cylinder was pricier (and they didn’t have the color I wanted). Things were also limited by my adamant insistence that there would be no sun roof in my future. This is the second time the damned thing had a major problem (It stuck open in St. Louis once, and refused to close). Since I was unsure, and Dale my sales chum wasn’t sure that I really needed AWD, he went to find one that was close to what I wanted for me to drive; so that I could compare them before deciding.

Called Mom again at that point, and essentially she listened while I talked myself into the cheaper FWD. After all, if the weather is that bad, I have no business going out and driving around in it. While she and I were on the phone, I got the dealer’s book of details on the Vues on the lot and found that there was a FWD in my color, no sunroof, with the basic things that I wanted.

Dale my chum comes back, and I tell him what I’m thinking and the other car I’m considering. He had me drive a bit in the AWD. I grant that it felt a little smoother than the FWD, with a bit more pick-up; but it wasn’t enough to make the price difference worth it—especially since I was going to have to settle for a color I didn’t really want (Storm Grey). I decided on the FWD&#8212$4K cheaper, the color I wanted, enough of the features that I wanted.

Next thing I knew, I was filling out forms and meeting with the business manager (whose car I started out driving at 10 AM). We went over the preliminaries, and she suggested that I go get my gold car, which was ready, minus the new sun roof, run some errands, empty the car, and come back around 4 PM to get the new car.

The rest of the afternoon was a hurried blur… prescriptions… groceries… emptying the car (no small task after 10 years)…. Just after 4, I was signing paperwork. By 5, I was driving off in my new car.

The stupidest part is when I got weepy when I had to hand over my old car. It was my baby car :( I swear it hurt to have to give it up. and I know that’s dumb, but that’s how it felt.

After I finished that purchase, I drove to Philo, cuz I needed to drive somewhere. Unfortunately, Lisa wasn’t home. There was a point as I was driving back to Champaign when I thought I should just get on the phone and call Dr.B and tell her I was coming over for a Mai Tai.

I still haven’t gotten to show it to anyone in person. Maybe I should go out and make sure it’s still in the garage or drive it around in the dark. I haven’t driven it in the dark yet. It still doesn’t feel real. If anything, it feels very unsettled. This isn’t how I planned to get a new car. I was going to wait till the Fall and get a hybrid. All said, I’m sure this had to be the right decision, but it just doesn’t feel perfect and right quite yet. From some distanced logical place, it feels like what I was supposed to do, like it has to have been the right thing. But from the emotional and real place where I am, it still feels so bizarre and unsure. Maybe after I drive it around a bit more. It had 22 miles on it when I got it, so I’ve only driven 31 miles. I’m sure it needs more time before it feels right.