Chad's spot for various thoughts, musings, poetry, ideas and whatnot

Saturday, July 10, 2004

What a long week...

This last week has been one to test my patience in a large number of ways. What I like for the summer is to have sort of a set schedule wherein I do the same sort of things at the same sort of times each and every day. I like the idea that the rush of the normal semester sort of settles down into a much more managable set of activities. When this happens I feel pretty centered and in control of things and the time I spend doing other activities has a joy brought about by being sort of the "spice" of a routine.

This last week has been anything but routine. Kathy and I have a theory that every so often a person sort of enters into a "Bermuda Triangle" of customer service wherein every attempt to get served by someone starts, ends and wallows in ineptitude on the good days and disaster on the bad ones. Our journey began last Sunday at the Griffin Home Depot. We went in to get a storage shed and a small, inexpensive lawnmower. We probably should have known better than to try to get stuff on the Fourth but we didn't and what should have taken fifteen minutes took over an hour. Fortunately, we did mange to finally get a little bit of help that wasn't either clueless, lazy or hungover from July 3rd festivities. The shed would have to be delivered on Wednesday but that was OK by me.

Then on Monday evening, the car died inexplicably. I mean just went clunk and wouldn't start. The problem was that I had on-line class stuff I had to do all day Tuesday and on-campus class all day Wednesday. Still I tried to arrainge a tow for Wednesday afternoon. AAA and the towing company conspried to keep us in the triangle and the tow truck couldn't be bothered to make it by 5:00 pm Wed. when the garage closed. Just to add to that, Home Depot delivered the shed on Wednesday but it turned out to be the wrong one ("Read?" wondered the young man in school, "Why should I have to learn how to read? I just plan to deliver stuff to people's house, I shouldn't need to read anything for that."). I think the overwhelming sense of frustration must have manifested in some sort of Jungian synchronistic way as while I stood there fuming about the absent tow truck and the mistaken shed the weather turned darker and more threatening by the minute. At about 5:00 pm the severe thunderstorm hit town and ripped apart trees from Aldora to Johnstonville. The lovely wife, who had ridden her bike to work had gotten "trapped" in the glorified shed her school district calls a technology building. Her lights flickered on and off while the building rattled. On our street I got to watch 100 year old oaks split in half due to wind sheer. While we had power for a time after the storm, that soon gave out too and we got to spend a long evening in the dark. The one saving grace was that there was a little cool air behind the storm so we didn't have to swelter.

Thursday I got to try to get two students to understand that they were failing my astronomy class and that they were at the end of the rope in terms of grade. They had to either get really busy or get out. On Friday they both came to class and both used some of the class time to catch up on their missing sleep. In my on-line class, a student who hasn't turned in anything for four weeks and who failed to respond to an e-mail message I send her two and a half weeks ago asking if she was going to drop the class e-mails me out of the blue and wants to know what she can do to get caught up. Argh!

So here it is on Saturday. We did get the shed delivered on Thursday and the car finally towed on Thursday. The tow guy was something out of deliverence who showed up almost 2 hours after he was supposed to and then didn't know he was on a AAA call. At least the Home Depot guys were nice abot the trade out and took care of things with a minimum of fuss. Friday, JH, the lovely wife and I got the shed up though it took us two hours longer than the directions indicated it would. We are autoless which wouldn't be such a bad thing except the 100+ degree heat index and the shopping errands we need to run. I don't mind running errands on the bike (actually I like it a lot...I get a sort of sense of taking the 'high ground' when I do it) but I sure would rather not do it in conditions that woudl kill a lot of people who tried it. With the car out, all racing is in jeopardy. I missed the Georgia Games road events and may end up missing the MTB events as well.

An additional annoyance is that this same little dog keeps showing up at the LW's workplace. The dog is about as ugly as any I've ever seen. She's spoiled rotten and the first time the LW brought her home she was antagonistic towards the boys. Cooper doesn't handle antagonism well so now he's scared of her. This is the third time she's shown up at the tech building and the third time she's come home. The dog's "owner" doesn't have a leash or collar for her and apparently this happens so frequently that the vet's office near the school has taken to using strong langauge when this woman comes looking for "her" dog. So I'm spending all weekend in a house with two retrievers who are desperately trying to avoid this UGLY dog.

Finally, I'm all out of ice cream and I can't go get a gallon at the store because it'd melt by the time I got home. I think if the weather doesn't deteriorate into the late afternoon/evening thunderstorm mess we seem to get one day in three (or every night for about the three weeks prior to this one) I'm going to walk down to Dairy Queen and get something really, really decadent. The good thing about living in a small town is that everything's close. Pbbbbtttt! Anyone have directions for getting out of The Triangle???

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