personal

Such a Saturday as this

Not a particularly exciting day. First thing, I drove my father over to our local mechanic to get his car inspected. And then I spent the day doing not much else. I watched last night’s episode of Fringe. I thought it was really good, a step back up from the past two maybe less than terrific weeks. And I read a little. Mostly, I just finished the first volume of Art Spiegelman’s Maus. And this evening, almost at random, I watched Crimes and Misdemeanors. It’s an interesting Woody Allen film, more like two films that brush up against each other in the end. I don’t know that it was brilliant, but it was thoughtful, sometimes funny, well acted, and I liked it.

And that’s really it for my Saturday.

Through a glass dorkly

My mom’s still not feeling so great, but she does seem slightly better than yesterday and the day before. Hopefully whatever this bug is, it will be out of her system before too much longer. And, I hope, without passing through anyone else’s system (i.e., without making me or my father as sick).

I spent the morning waiting around for my car’s windshield to be replaced. I got to the repair place around 8 o’clock this morning, and I returned home around 11. In between that, I just hung out in their waiting room. Thankfully, I had my iPad along with me, but I can definitely see why people leave their cars and come back for them later. And if the shop wasn’t closed for the weekend at 5 o’clock on Friday, I’d have considered doing that too.

Anyway, it was a long but not terrible morning. I got to listen to a few horror stories by one of the guys who works there, who apparently also works as a mechanic for the highway patrol. It makes you cold, he told one of the other customers, seeing all those dead bodies. The customer, who had apparently once been an EMT, said he knew exactly what he meant.

At 11, I came home to take the dog out and check on my mom. Then I caught a train into Manhattan and worked a half day.

Exciting stuff, I know.

The face of Thursday

What a day! For me, it wasn’t anything too special. I filed a claim with my insurance company for the cracked car windshield I’m planning to have replaced tomorrow morning. And…well, actually, not a whole lot more than that.

But meanwhile, my parents spent most of the day at the hospital. My mother hasn’t been feeling well since at least Tuesday night — this on top of her recovery from foot surgery — and today her doctor recommended she go to the emergency room for tests. I didn’t know any of this until late in the afternoon, when my father called me at work, and then we played some more phone tag after that. But luckily, she seems to be okay. Unluckily, she does seem to have a pretty nasty stomach bug that just won’t quit. We’re hoping it just needs time to work through her system, and that she’ll be feeling better in a day or two.

Her foot, meanwhile, is doing much better.

Put me in coach, I’m ready to play today

So it’s Wednesday already, huh? What’s that? Nearly Thursday? I’ll say this much for the week: it’s going back pretty fast.

At work today, we had one of our regular “brown bag lunches,” the last we’ll have before we move offices in April. This one was on coaching — “not just for the sports world anymore” — and I’m not really sure if it was intended to get us into coaching as clients or along the path to becoming coaches ourselves. It was reasonably engaging, I guess; everyone who asked or answered any questions got a ticket for a prize at the end. The prize was a deck of “question cards,” not that impressive, and I didn’t earn any tickets — which, given how freely our speaker was handing them out, actually is sort of impressive. (Once, after she’d given one person a ticket, she asked another person, “Was that what you were going to say too?” When that person nodded, she handed out another ticket.)

Beyond that, though, it wasn’t a terribly exciting day. Mostly just cold. Right now, I’m just kind of hoping I don’t get sick. My mother, who spent the weekend and early part of the week recuperating from minor foot surgery, has unfortunately come down with some kind of stomach virus. She talked with her doctor today, so I hope she’s on the mend. She hasn’t even really had a chance to properly look at this get-well soon gift my sister sent her yesterday.

Whispering pigs

I felt slightly off my game for most of today. I’m not really sure I know what my game is, to be perfectly honest, but I know I felt slightly off it. It was an unexciting Tuesday all around.

I neglected to mention yesterday’s bit of Forgotten English, which is a shame, because it’s particularly nice. It’s “pig’s whisper,” meaning “a very short space of time.” One of the quotes is from Charles Dickens’ Pickwick Papers, in which he wrote, “You’ll find yourself in bed in something less than a pig’s whisper.”

Won’t one, though?