Today was a day where I had very different plans from what I ended up doing, and they weren't things I would have chosen if I had my way. Justin was going to take our Camry to work today, but when we went out into the garage it had a flat tire. Lovely start. After I had breakfast with the kids I took them out into the garage to show them how to change a tire. After all, kids need to know this stuff, right? (I learned when I had my learner's permit as a teenager and had a little Encounter with a curb that I had spun around into during my first venture into snow driving. Sure my dad was going to holler, I looked at him to discover he was laughing. Then he had me change the dripping wet tire in our garage when we got home.) It was an easy tire change, and everyone got to do something: taking grunting turns with tight lug nuts, moving stuff around, turning the crank on the jack. Then B. and E. accompanied me to the tire store a few blocks from home. I asked the tire guys to look at the tire I took off (I found a nail in it), look at the slightly flat spare, and also look at the driver's side front tire that looked suspiciously low. Since they said it was going to take about forty-five minutes, the kids and I decided to walk to a nearby park so they could play instead of sitting cooped up in the tire store with nothing good to do. They had a ball a the park. I remembered I love walking around neighborhoods and seeing different homes and yards. When we got back on time we discovered they hadn't even pulled our car into a repair bay. Sigh. It was another 50 minutes before we were out of there. Turns out the front tire also had a couple of punctures in it they repaired, and the spare just needed some new air. Phew! It was dollar-inexpensive and time-costly. That killed the morning.
After a quick lunch I loaded everyone up to go help get the last of Justin's things from his old school. I had inquired about how much time we had left to get the rest of his stuff out before the building was demolished. I was told we had until the end of May. When I got to the school today there was a paper sign on his door that said "Done 5/27/08". When I opened the door I could see that other people had been through the office and cleaned some things out. What was gone was not what we were interested, fortunately, so I had the kids haul some things out to the back of the van. The kids went into excited scavenger mode, asking if they could have this or that. They came home with some interesting treasures. The worse news, though, was when I pulled the car around to the front of the building to get three boxes of books Justin had left in his classroom to get later and found that his room was practically bare. All the books were gone. After some frantic and, I'll admit it, tearful searching, I found out that the new English dept. chair thought Justin had gotten all of his stuff and she had just packed up everything left in the room and took it over to the new building. Everything from the old building has to be stored in one wing of the building until July, so there's no way to get to the boxes until then. Sigh. I was glad to find them, but frustrated about the miscommunication.
After making a run up to Justin's new school to drop some things off, switching cars, and stopping at the old school again to pick up a couple of chairs from Justin's old office, we headed home. I put on some The New Red Green Show episodes for therapy after a dinner of left-overs. Have you heard of The New Red Green Show? It's a hilarious Canadian comedy. It did the trick for my heart.
Tomorrow is a new day, right?
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