Selling Sno-Cones at the Beach

tree, meet car; car, meet tree

My neighbor, who has some, um, unconventional ideas about urban forestry, has some kind of weed tree growing about 2 mm from our driveway, and this morning, backing down in a sleep-deprived fog, I caught the rear-view mirror assembly square on, and smashed it to bits.

The tree is fine, btw. I hope they can replace the whole assembly without too much trouble. Driving to school, I kept glancing in the now-nonexistent rear view to check my left side. I suppose I can get used to driving without it, but it's probably illegal, although MN is pretty liberal about those sorts of things.

For example, it's perfectly legal to do electrical wiring in your own home, and in a duplex if it is owner-occupied. (Little things you learn teaching legal issues in construction.) In MA this could never be allowed (although people do it all the time).

That little crash snapped me out of my ozone layer long enough to drive to school and get through the first meeting, but I started to space out in the second, then forgot totally about a third, and came home to finish my big seminar paper, which B and I drove to my professor's house an hour or so ago.

Woo-hoo! Well, actually, I'm a little less sanguine than that. If I could have a couple of weeks to think about the topic and do some selected rereading, the paper could probably be improved a great deal. But I just had to force myself to stop micro-managing every comma and just get it done.

This weekend I plan to write the two papers that are due on Monday, and then I'll be able to spend Monday and Tuesday reviewing for the Public Affairs final. Looking at the study questions, I feel as though I've retained nothing.

In general, that's how I feel. I have only the most general, superficial, and probably erroneous notion of the vast amount of reading I've done this term. It was a skim-and-get-the-gist sort of affair, all semester long.

Hey, I just realized that we get almost FOUR months off. Summer is essentially 1/3 of the year, and it's all FREE TIME. THAT certainly calls for a woo and a hoo!

Oh. "Weed tree" is legit plant talk. It's a tree that no one wants, because it grows too fast, or drips stuff, or tends to break off and fall on cars/people/houses, or can't be killed, or reproduces itself faster than rabbits. My first car was a station wagon, and it was a tree MAGNET. I could be driving down the parkway on a perfectly sunny, calm day, and boom, a limb would fall down and crash on the roof.

I think B fell asleep in the big chair while grading. Maybe instead of another glass of wine we should just go to bed.

Til tomorrow....

Posted by otto0114 at May 7, 2004 10:06 PM