I Had a Topic Once...

With all apologies to Devin and King Winkles, I'm not going back to add a Wednesday post. Though my failure to put up anything yesterday marks my third such slip since my new lease on blogging, I won't live a lie by backdating entries.

Yesterday was another "crashed-on-the-couch-and-didn't-wake-until-the-morning" evenings; their frequency suggests that perhaps I ought to get more sleep. Seeing as how I'm writing this at 2:05am, that doesn't seem to have happened yet. Joanna claims she tried to wake me a few times last night and get me to come to bed. In her bizzarro-world version, each time she tried I'd look up, nod, then fall back asleep. I dropped off at 10pm (just at the end of Lost, so I don't know what happened at the end; this is not unusual for this show, but this time it was because I didn't see it, not because I did see it and just failed to understand, as is the normal state of things) and awoke at 4am with a splitting headache. An odd way to start the day.

The excitement continued as I made my way down the hill. My left front tire has been getting balder and balder (no, not the Norse god; my tire was not becoming a Scandanavian diety), squealing like a stuck pig on every right-hand turn. When I stopped for gas I inspected it, only to find the head of a large nail sticking out of what remained of the tread. So it was off to Wal-Mart next door (thankfully) to get two new tires. I missed my class for something like the fourth time this semester. Even worse, since it's an 8am class, when I do miss it no one is there to tell the students (the secretary doesn't usually get classes posted before 9am), so they just sit for a while, then wander off. I can't imagine that's going to help my upcoming evaluations any.

On the good side, they got the tire fixed relatively quickly and I was able to keep my appointment to meet young Dan Bloomer over at the Borders in the new Victoria Gardens shopping district in Rancho Cucamonga (and my out-of-state readers will think that "Cucamonga" was just a location Bugs Bunny made up because it sounded funny; Walla-Walla Washington is a real city, too). It's a very nice area, with all new stores built up in a sprawling neighborhood designed with pedestrians in mind--brick crosswalks, generous sidewalks, grassy areas, window-shopping. The only downers were (a) being surrounded by such naked monuments to consumerism (my own hang-up, I know; I spend my days in mega-bookstores like Borders and Barnes & Noble's, so who am I to criticize?) and (b) being surrounded by such expensive naked monuments to consumerism that I can't afford to look at the merchandise too long because I can't afford the "browsing fee." Some very upscale stores down there.

Dan and I had our "man time," wandering around the store, talking about random novels we found, sipping frou-frou coffee drinks (mine: large manly steaming hot vanilla latte; Dan's: girly blended-ice frilly vanilla sissy drink). It was a nice break and Dan was very patient with my constant yapping about nothing at all.

Then it was off to Burbank for a few hours of grading and being smacked upside the head artistically by Madeline L'Engel in her book on Christian art, Walking on Water. She has some slightly oddball views on some spiritual issues that I'm not quite sure about, but she really knows her stuff when it comes to personal faith and the ways in which art interacts with belief in Christ. My favorite bit was that she very firmly states that bad art=bad religion. Right on, sister woman.

Some other stuff happened, but I'm fairly certain that most readers will have nodded off by this time, so I'll trail off aimlessly here with a random unintelligible phrase:

Boy, it's colder than a torpedo in here...