The Damage

Here’s a picture of what the damage from last week’s accident looks like. We will deal with repairing the car when I get back at the end of March. At that point, we’ll just hope that the repairs won’t be too expensive! Unfortunately, we live in an area where a car is a necessity. I’ve never seen a bus around here, and given my lack of experience riding bicycles in traffic, that idea is out as well. My poor little car!

Glad to See I Haven't Forgotten the Basics...

You Passed 8th Grade Math

Congratulations, you got 10/10 correct!

Could You Pass 8th Grade Math?

SUV Humor

While Tim and I were out today, we saw a funny spare tire cover on an SUV. The words were upside down and read:

“If you can read this, flip me back over”

Finally, an SUV owner who has a sense of humor about the inherent instability of his vehicle.

One Week To Go!

Next Wednesday I am flying to Buenos Aires. Unfortunately Tim won’t be joining me this time around since he doesn’t have enough vacation time accrued yet at his new job. He will stay here with Lena—I am sure they are both thrilled at the prospect of spending 3 weeks with each other! I hope Tim will pet her, even if he won’t admit it to me. I don’t know how he can resist—Lena is so soft and cuddly. I know I am going to miss her. And Tim, of course!

This will be my first trip to Buenos Aires and Montevideo in nearly 5 years, and I am very excited! I can’t wait to see my family after such a long time. Well, I saw my mother in January, but I’m happy to spend some more time with her. And I’m also looking forward to eating certain foods I can’t find here. My nephew Seba is going to have ear surgery while I’m there, so I’ll await word from my brother regarding the best time to go to Montevideo. On the way back, I’ll stop in Tampa for a couple of days and will be back in Phoenix on March 25. At that point I will concentrate all my energy on one thing: getting a job. The job search got interrupted by this wonderful opportunity to go and see my family, but when I get back I’ll have to find work. I only hope it will be better than my job in Oklahoma. Then again, that office was so badly run that it would be hard to find something worse, but you never know.

Now I just have to finish the scarves for my nephews. Two of them are already done (and look really good, if I say so myself!), and the third one is progressing nicely. I’m really enjoying the knitting and already have plans for my next project. I do need to find out whether knitting needles are allowed in carry-on luggage so I can knit during the long flights ahead of me. They might be considered dangerous items, as ridiculous as that sounds.

Utter Stupidity

I have done it: I have caused my first car crash. And very stupidly at that. Luckily the driver of the other car and I are both fine, but I feel very dumb. And I still don’t know how much the repairs to my car are going to cost. I had pulled out of my parking spot and was about to go through an intersection in the parking lot. I saw another car coming on my right, but I was convinced that I would clear the intersection before he ever got there. It didn’t even occur to me that we might have a problem. Clearly that was a gross miscalculation and by the time I realized it wasn’t going to work, it was too late. The other car hit the right rear wheel section of my car. Thankfully the other driver wasn’t as angry as he might have been and mostly seemed annoyed. It appeared that his car only suffered cosmetic damage. We exchanged information and he went about his way. I thought I’d just drive over to my insurance agent since their office was nearby, but that was when I realized my car wasn’t going anywhere. It made an odd grinding noise and a few feet later I noticed I didn’t have brakes. So I pulled into another parking spot and called AAA. They asked me what town I was in but I didn’t know if I was in Gilbert or Chandler so they had to look it up and finally concluded I was in Gilbert. They told me that before their driver towed me away I’d have to file a police report. They also told me I’d have to wait 2 hours for a tow truck to come and get me. Of course this also happened on a day when I hadn’t recharged my cell phone and so my battery was running low. However, I remembered that there was a Sprint store nearby. Before heading over there, I called the Gilbert police and they told me that because the crash had taken place on private property, there were no injuries, and there was no hit-and-run, I didn’t need a police report. OK. So I went over to Sprint and asked the guy at the store if I could charge up my phone there. He hooked up my phone and I just waited for my battery to get back up to a level that would sustain a long phone call to my insurance company. Back in my car, I called the insurance company, told them what happened, how it happened, and gave them all the information from the other driver. At that point I still had about 45 more minutes to wait for the tow truck, but he came early! I was very relieved. I showed him the damage and told him about the brakes going out, and from what he said the repairs might cost, it sounds like it won’t be too bad. I really hope that the repairs will be in the range that he mentioned and that they won’t end up costing us a small fortune. I don’t care about the looks of the car, so I don’t need for them to repair anything that’s purely cosmetic, but the car will definitely need some work to run again since the brakes don’t work (the guy said I’d need the brake line replaced) and there was that odd grinding noise due to the wheel being crooked. What a stupid accident—entirely preventable. I always complain about bad drivers, and there I go and do exactly the kind of stuff that I complain about. I guess there’s a first time for everything.

Hooked

OK, I just spent the last 3 hours playing World of Warcraft. I think I’m officially hooked. Earlier in the evening, Tim, Tara and I played with the troll characters we had created yesterday. My character is a mage and as we went along Tim and Tara showed me various things. When Tim went to bed I thought I’d try something different and created a new character, which is a tauren druid. I didn’t choose that for any strategic reason since I don’t know enough about the game to do that. I just liked the character’s appearance—tauren look like cow-human hybrids. I spent a bit of time killing things and completing quests and managed to reach level 6. My character died a couple of times—the first time because something attacked me and I didn’t realize until it was too late, and the second time because when I resurrected I got attacked again and wasn’t able to fight off my attacker. But then I figured out a few more things and stayed alive to kill the creatures I needed to kill. I finally decided I had to quit for the night so I took my character back to the village where I had started, sold a few items, got some more training, and lay down to sleep for the night. I’m looking forward to playing again tomorrow. And I will need to ask Tim for some help with one of my pending quests.

New Skills

On Monday, I learned two new skills from Tara: knitting and playing World of Warcraft. I hadn’t thought much about knitting till Tara showed me some of the things she had made and insisted it wasn’t hard to learn. So I thought I should give it a shot. My mother had shown me how when I was little and I had knitted a couple of scarves for my bears, but that was a long while back and I didn’t remember how to do it. Tara and I went to Joann’s and I got some blue yarn and a pair of bamboo needles. Of course, I needed a project and I didn’t want something that would be too hard to start with. I settled on the idea of a scarf, but I don’t have any use for a scarf here, so I thought of my nephews. This made my small starting project a bigger one since I have to make three scarves—one for each nephew. But I think that will give me plenty of practice with simple knitting. I thought putting a pattern into the scarf would be beyond my beginner’s skills till Tara showed me just how easy some of those patterns can be. I have made a lot of progress on my first scarf since Monday and have over 40 inches already knitted. The pattern looks cool too! I knitted several rows at Tara’s house after she taught me the basics and she helped me fix problems there. At home I’m on my own and with one of her books I’ve managed to fix the mistakes I’ve made, including a dropped stitch this morning that made me panic for a moment. She had told me to go find her in the bowling alley on Tuesday if I was stuck, but luckily that didn’t become necessary. I know I will need some further help when it comes to actually finishing the scarf, and I will also need a little help starting the next one, but I think I’m doing rather well for a beginner!

As for World of Warcraft, Tim had been trying to get me on the game for a long time since it would be something we could do together. Well, the game just sounded so complicated since he was always talking about numbers that it just didn’t appeal to me. On New Year’s Eve, we were over at Tara and Jim’s house and Tara and Linda were telling me more about the game and the people they play with and Tara invited me to come learn the game with her someday. She insisted that the game didn’t need to be as complicated as Tim made it sound and that I didn’t have to worry so much about keeping track of numbers. So I agreed and finally made it over there Monday morning. She created a character for me and showed me the basic commands so I could see what the game is about. I have to say I enjoyed hunting boars and picking cactus apples for some big guy’s “Cactus Apple Surprise,” and the evil familiars were amusing even if annoying. Yesterday Tim and I set up my account and created a new character for me. We got Tara online as well and the three of us attempted to play together. Unfortunately our internet connection had been very flaky for the last few days and while we’d had a technician here yesterday morning, we continued to have problems. As a result, Tim and I were losing our internet connection every few minutes and finally we just had to tell Tara that we were quitting for the night. Earlier this afternoon yet another technician came over to look at our cable connection and came up with another fix. So far our internet connection seems happy, and we are hoping this time it will last. In a while Tim and I will get back on the game and we hope we won’t get dropped like we were getting dropped last night. We also hope that Tara will be available to join us on our adventures.

Catnip Overdose

Earlier today, Lena’s dream came true: I spilled too much catnip on the floor. We were outside and Lena was rolling around on a square of cement that I think is meant for a grill. That gave me the idea of giving her some catnip and when I opened the tub, instead of giving her the usual amount, I accidentally dumped most of the catnip on the ground. I tried scooping it up before she got into it, but it was too late. Lena was lying on the bed of catnip and her fur was covered. I still scooped what I could back into the tub, but most of Lena was coated in the stuff. So I let her enjoy the moment and watched her while she rolled around on the ground. I also took a few pictures, but since I’m only halfway through that roll I won’t have them for at least a few days. I called Tim out to see Lena and afterwards I tried to brush the catnip off her fur. Bad idea—she started attacking me. She generally gets aggressive when she’s on catnip, but this time she was under the influence of a lot more catnip than usual, so she was not letting me clean her up. I didn’t want her in the house with that much catnip on her fur so I ran inside to get her new Kong cat brush (which, by the way, is the best cat brush I’ve ever had). I brushed off what catnip remained on her fur and eventually she went back in the house. The rest of the spilled catnip is still outside for her next outdoor adventure.

And speaking of outdoor adventures, last night was the first time I let Lena out in the evening. Tim and I had just bought and assembled a picnic table for the backyard, and we had also discovered that Sam’s Club sells liquor quite cheap. So we stocked up for our new liquor cabinet, which we received as a joint gift from my mother and some friends. We decided to enjoy the fact that in Phoenix you can sit outdoors in the evening in early February and made up some drinks. We had some music playing inside so we had the door partly open and Lena decided to see what was going on. At first I was a worried about letting her out in the evening, but Lena knows where her food is and wasn’t going to stray far. I still made sure she stayed in the lit parts of the backyard. She did her usual sniffing and walking around and then got into her nighttime crazy mode and started digging in the small stones that cover our backyard. She dug several shallow holes and was pouncing on imaginary things and finally squatted over on of the holes. I thought she was going to go to the bathroom but just then something startled her and she didn’t. Eventually she went back inside and it was there that I realized she had orange paws from all her digging around. Even today her paws aren’t back to their usual white color but they’re cleaner at least. Lena’s having way too much fun in Arizona!