We had been warned that a particular individual was not very, shall we say, socially adept.  It was still a bit disturbing.

You are aware that a dear friend was in an accident a couple weeks back.  He does not drive; he was being driven home from work at the time.  The vehicle was totalled and the driver has no way of replacing it, and our friend has no way of getting to and from work without it.  Thus we have lent him one of our vehicles so that he can have someone drive him to work.

Yes, it is inconvenient, but as I told him fifteen years ago, friendship only matters when it is inconvenient.  The Lord has provided some alternate assistance in this regard, as we have been using the disused car of one of our houseguests, and the son who has his own car is home for a couple weeks before going to his summer job.  The only real inconvenience is that we are lending the truck, for various reasons, and we need it once a week to take trash to the dump.  We missed doing this on Saturday simply because we were too late, but we arranged to pick it up late last night to return it this afternoon.  They were not going to need it until five, and as it turns out he was too sick to go to work today anyway so they did not need it then.

Note, for context, that we are lending them this truck, and that we need in one day each week, but that we do not inconvenience them by asking them to drive it to us for us to use on that one day.  No, instead of insisting that they make one round trip to let us use our own truck for an hour or so each week, we make one round trip to pick it up and another to return it, paying two bridge tolls in the process where they would only have had to pay one.  (For anyone not aware of it, it is a joke in New Jersey that all the bridges have one way tolls–it is free to enter the state, but you have to pay to leave.  This covers all the New York bridges, the Delaware bridge, and the Philadelphia area bridges; there are a few northern Delaware River bridges that are free in both directions, and you can of course cross the northern border into New York State at no charge.)

I accept all this.  I pretty much agreed to it.  So what has me annoyed?  Well, after we got home from borrowing our truck, the girl who drives it for him gave us a call to say that we borrowed the truck and she hoped we remembered to put gas in it.

In point of fact, we did put gas in it–about fifty dollars worth of gas in a tank which was three quarters empty.  We might have used ten dollars worth of it ourselves, maybe a bit more–but that was before we filled it.  I don’t begrudge them the gas.  I begrudge them the attitude.

I’m told she is the perhaps a bit spoiled but now cut off daughter of rather wealthy parents, so perhaps she does not understand common courtesy and gratitude.  There also may be some bad feeling, as she, let us say, does not really like all of his friends.  I will let it pass, and try to have it not influence future decisions and attitudes.

Of course, I’m sure they are not reading this blog, and I trust that none of you are going to repeat this to anyone who might know them.  After all, everyone knows that if you have secrets you want to keep secret, the best thing to do is blog them on the Internet.  I should probably delete all of this–but then I would have to think of something else to write, and I’m late and it’s tired, so I’m going with what I have.  I’ll deal with the repercussions later.

–M. J. Young

I am angry at someone.  I have not yet determined who.  No, it probably is not you, so you can relax.

I am angry because I was sent on a fool’s errand simply because someone was too inconsiderate to answer a phone message to let me know it was not necessary.  I am angry because this is the second time this person did this, in very much the same way, with slightly different circumstances, although the first time there was considerably less inconvenience to me.

It goes back to our friend who was in the car accident almost two weeks ago.  We responded to his rather desperate situation by lending him our truck, somewhat hampering our ability to accomplish some of our essential chores.  We left “care and feeding” instructions with it, including that the brake fluid and power steering fluid had to be checked regularly, as they both leak slowly.

On Saturday, we were going to need it; by the time we actually got around to getting over there it was too late, though, so we didn’t take it.  We did move it, though–not I, but someone else involved.  This led to a phone call from them asking where we put it, as they could not find it.

Now, I don’t know where you would go with that, but my thought was that we needed to confirm that it was indeed missing and then call the police.  They, however, found it, and went to the movies and shut off their phones so we could not contact them.  I would have thought they’d have had the sense to call and say, “Never mind, we found it.”  Instead, they left us wondering for several hours until one of them–actually one of the backup people we called, a mutual friend closer to them than to us–got the message and let us know what was happening.  They are fortunate that the police were not making inquiries by then; we were very close to driving over to find out what happened, and that would have given us no more information than we already had.

I have not mentioned that driving over is an hour if the traffic is light.  It was not light on Saturday night.

So here it is Monday, and we get a message–and I do not know how we got the message, but I think it was a voicemail on our phone called in while we were sleeping.  We knew that our friend was not particularly mechanically inclined, but he had assured us that he would keep up on the fluids.  The message said that they could not figure out how to open the hood, and the brakes were failing.

That sounds like a pretty serious situation to me; it sounded like an emergency to the person who actually got the message.  Of course, it is still Monday, and I still had to feed kids and get my mother-in-law to the store.  Plus, it happens to be Memorial Day, so the store was going to close three hours early, pinching my time frame significantly.  Yet I had to add a trip over to check the truck.

Did I mention that this trip is an hour out of the way?  It is also an hour to get to my mother-in-law.  This trip was not the opposite direction, but it was certainly the wrong direction, and when I finished it I would be no closer to my shopping trip than I had been when I started.  I took the precaution of calling to confirm that there was still a problem.  I got a voice mail box, but left a message that I should be called if my information was incorrect.  Then I headed out to solve the problem with the truck.  After all, if they had solved the problem after letting us know they needed help, they would have called us, right?

Apparently, wrong.  An hour later (a bit longer, as I grabbed supper for myself on the road so as not to have to delay long enough to eat when I fed the kids) I am opening the hood to the truck and finding that the reservoir for the brakes is overfilled, and there is a new can of brake fluid (not the one I’d left) in the bed.  Of course, they haven’t kept the power steering fluid full, and the coolant level is low, but I took care of those items and then jumped back in my car and made best possible speed to my final errand.

I saw no one.  It may be that they do not know I was there–although I moved the seat to start the car when I was checking the transmission fluid.  I could have saved an hour of driving, maybe ten dollars in gas, a three dollar bridge toll, and a fair amount of aggravation, had they simply let us know that indeed they had managed to solve the problem after alerting us.

It is not that I begrudge people my help when they need it.  I begrudge them my help when they don’t need it and forget to let me know that they have things under control.  I have enough to do without adding such things to my workload.  I do hope this does not happen again.

–M. J. Young

I am not even entirely certain myself what happened to yesterday.  It was one thing after another, and then when I finally returned from the last thing, picking up a son who wanted to come home for a few days, I looked at a clock which made it nearly one thirty, and I gave up the day without even starting the morning Corinthians study.

Today is a bit easier to explain.  The car trouble was getting worse, not better, despite home remedy efforts yesterday, and I was anticipating making a major trip north this weekend for which things needed to be right.  Thus I took my two and a half hours of sleep last night, and dragged myself into clothes and out of the house this morning (which took much longer than it ought to have done), taking the car to a mechanic who does reliable work quickly.  It proved to be the water pump, not, as had been hoped, one of the hoses; but it is working now.  Since I am no longer in the sort of shape that makes hikes of over five miles reasonable affairs, I spent the morning in a diner a block from the shop, working on editing my Romans work while drinking coffee to stay awake.  When I got home (by way of a grocery store to pick up something for a couple of suppers), I was too tired to think and too tense to sleep, so the rest of the day was lost.  Then, maybe an hour and a half ago, I realized that I was waking up a bit despite not having slept, and I determined to do at least a bit of what I would otherwise have to boot into tomorrow, my off day.

However, tomorrow will be early, even though I think I have been saved from having it be long.  There is a morning trip scheduled relative to helping someone with transportation but making sure that we have the vehicles we need for the work we have to do.  There may be more than one such trip, but everything changed this evening when a call came asking that we reschedule our northbound trip to next weekend.  This was originally proposed as a way to help us with our transportation problems, but when I announced that we had resolved the repair of the car and that next weekend would be worse, it came out that people we are visiting are not well and would like a week to recover.  Thus I think it will be next weekend–although things change so abruptly around here, that nothing can be certain.

And for this reason I am going to nip my efforts short tonight, finish the barest essentials of what I missed yesterday and today, and see whether my body will let me sleep.

–M. J. Young

I was unusually tired today, with the result that I was unusually slow in getting through anything I had to do.  I had to do a few errands, make a few phone calls, and really nothing significant to report, but it all derailed me quite a bit.

For those who have been concerned about our circumstances, they improved a bit today.  That’s probably more than I should say, but I appreciate the prayers, concerns, and encouragement that have come from so many.

There is still a bit of car trouble complicating life, but we are managing for the present.  Also, I spoke with the friend who was trying to call, although I’ll probably speak with him again, possibly tonight if I stay awake, which I might do given the forums still awaiting me.

I’m not sure what to entitle this post.  I’ve always been bad at titles–I have at least three songs that are called Untitled with some notation to let me know which untitled song is which.  Rather than waste time thinking of a title for this one, I think I’ll just creatively acknowledge my lack of creative thinking at the moment.

–M. J. Young

There was a disruption in my Tuesday night that might have been overlooked:  one of the female friends of one of my sons (not a girlfriend) called around three in the morning because she was maybe a mile away and her truck was making horrible noises and screaming that it was low on oil.  Since I was not certain where she was, and I was still doing forums, I rather unchivalrously let her walk to me (it’s not a bad area, and she’s a pretty tough girl), and then drove back with her to add oil from our supply into her crankcase.  It was not, I think, so bad as she feared, but she blew an engine once, apparently, by ignoring the warning lights, so she was wise to avoid the risk.  I returned home with enough time to finish my work before dealing with the morning schoolboys, and then got a bit of sleep before working on Wednesday, which was late most of the day, as mentioned.

Today I knew I was committed to an early afternoon errand, and when I returned from that I recognized the need to get dinner made, which was served just in time for Brittany to arrive for the Collision rehearsal.  Baxter did not make it; his little sister was involved as a store clerk in an armed robbery this afternoon, and he had just gotten her home from the police station when we called to find out where he was.  Adam arrived, although he was a bit late.  It was, however, a good rehearsal overall, as we spent time trying to learn the second tier songs.

I got dinner myself after that, and have been trying to get through the day from the delayed beginning since then.

–M. J. Young

The Saturn, the car with good gas mileage, has started losing coolant.  I’ve had to top it off a few times in recent weeks.  The problem is, I don’t know how fast it’s losing coolant–and this is complicated by the fact that the design of this vehicle does not include direct access to the radiator, but only to the overflow tank, which is under pressure when the vehicle is hot.  Thus I cannot easily determine whether there is air in the radiator trying to get out.

The problem was severe last night, as the car started overheating en route to the fulfillment of an interstate errand, and the one running the errand (not I) had to return to swap for the less-efficient truck.  This creates uncertainty, since on the one hand I had topped off the tank Saturday afternoon, but on the other hand I do not know that there was no air in the radiator and I do know that there was extensive driving done Saturday night and Sunday morning, which could have depleted the reserve.

Right now someone is driving the vehicle around locally to see whether the added coolant is sufficient; when the car returns, I will have to let it cool and then open up the overflow tank to check the level.

All of this is because it is Monday, and part of the Monday workload includes taking my mother-in-law shopping.

It has also been a strange Monday, as I was informed sometime late yesterday that one of my sons would need to be seen by a doctor today, so (after going back to bed after bus riders were organized) I forced myself out of bed once the office was open and made a call to get an appointment.  The first available appointment was at crack of dawn tomorrow–actually, eight in the morning, but that’s outrageously early by my standards–and so he did not go today.  However, I had by then forced myself into wakefulness, and so attempted to get started on my day–an effort which took longer than I would have preferred, and then was interrupted several times once the hurdles were crossed.

At the moment, then, I am trying to get as much of this work done as I am able while awaiting the return of the car so I can figure out what I’m doing for dinner and what I’m doing about the car.  Once those matters are settled, I will be dealing with my mother-in-law with whichever vehicle is guessed to be the better choice, and returning to finish whatever was left undone.

So maybe I do know what I’m doing; I just don’t know that I know.

–M. J. Young

I suppose it was a sort of accomplishment.

I finished my scheduled Monday work last night, signing out from posting to the Corinthians list just as my wife finished hers and arrived home.  We were both dealing with those last-thing-before-bed things when the phone rang, and our son wanted to come home from his work address.  Normally my wife would go, as she enjoys late night drives; or else, if she was not feeling well, I would go.  However, she decided we would both go.  That, though, meant that our departure was delayed a bit longer, and we stayed a bit longer at the other end than we otherwise might have done.  I got home in time to shut off the five o’clock alarm and give the first boy his medicine as he prepared for school.

We had a bit of a scare, because his bus was late.  I do not recall it ever having been late, and thus our fear was that it had come early and he had missed it.  This would have meant an extra forty minutes or more of driving for me, to deliver him to the school.  However, it arrived, and he caught it.  I, then, proceeded to prod the other boy, the one who has to catch the next bus but who lately has been freed from riding buses because his girlfriend drives and has her own car.  He is not an easy starter, but I managed to get him to acknowledge verbally that it was six thirty-one.

I’m afraid that the next thing I remember was said girlfriend standing over him telling him that he had to hurry, because she had misplaced her car keys and her father was driving them.  He flew out of the house remarkably quickly as I apologized for failing to roust him quicker, and I finally had the opportunity to get ready for bed.

All of which means that I am finally hitting the ground for today’s work.  I have managed in the midst of everything else to arrange for our mechanic to take a look at the car one of my sons is hoping will be available for him to take to school soon.  I’ve unblocked it in the drive, but one of our houseguests has apparently decided it is a good place to store stuff, so I’m going to have to get him to clean it out later before it vanishes.  However, there is much still to do, so I’d better get to the doing.

–M. J. Young

I got in late from my anniversary dinner to find a message from one of the ushers at our wedding. I’d like to say he remembered our anniversary, but the truth is he recently found my web pages (through the songs, I think–he was drummer in The Last Psalm back in the early seventies) and has called a couple times, and when he got someone else here he was told that we were out celebrating the wedding he attended thirty-one years ago. I returned his call, because he has emphasized that he is always up late, and indeed he was up and chatted with me for quite a while. Eventually he was asking about the books and the Multiverser game, and I have promised him that today I will set up the character generation thread for him, and he has promised that he will call me around ten tonight to walk him through it–he knows so little about role playing games that he thought Dungeons & Dragons™ was originally a card game. So I’ve a bit of extra work on my plate, but a new gamer on the way. I’m toying with running him in a world I’ve never even thought of running before, but it’s going to take me a bit of scrambling to put it together. Anyone know anything about the history of Bourbon Street Jazz?

Meanwhile, the car is back, brakes repaired; the truck will be another day, hopefully not more than that.

–M. J. Young

There is really not much to say today. I am told that the truck might be ready tomorrow morning, and that the car will also be done by the afternoon, so here’s hoping at least one of them is right; we had to return the borrowed van this morning and borrow a houseguest’s car for an hour, but now I’m piloting a rental boat–seriously, I’ve been driving minivans for the past several years, and this thing feels huge. Actually, it’s as if it’s bigger on the outside than it is on the inside, to reverse the famed comment about a more flexible vehicle. When I’m standing next to it, I feel as if it’s really huge, but when I’m inside it I don’t really have the sense of roominess inside.

I was thinking that I really had nothing to report here. I fell asleep early last night, awoke in the middle of the night and saw to a few things, then went back to bed, got up to roust the schoolboy, then went back to bed. I think I’m well rested, although my body seems to be fighting something. I didn’t watch anything I needed to watch, but then I’ve not yet moved the DVD player back to the bedroom. I did take my mother-in-law shopping, which took up a fair chunk of the evening. I’ve got a dinner date after work tonight, to celebrate our thirty-first anniversary (I hope I’ve done the math aright), and she expects to be out on time so I really don’t have much time to finish what’s on my plate as it is. So it’s a day with little to report.

However, when I arrived to write this blog, the site software informed me that there was an incoming link to the site from a source with a rather disturbingly vulgar name–at least, to me. It turns out to be a blog by one of our gamers, linking to his game thread here at Gaming Outpost–one of Scott’s people, not mine, although that doesn’t really make a difference. I’m not sure I understand the logic of the vulgarity, although perhaps it is his first blog entry and he’s hoping it will show up in search engines and get him some readers. Probably if it works, they won’t be back.

Anyway, as mentioned, I don’t have a lot of time. I’d better use it well.

–M. J. Young

I have continued to fight my way through the analysis of Primer, writing as I reason, and challenging my understanding of the film with each step. I need to view it again before I can finish it, because there is an extended segment about a guy with a shotgun at a party that I’ve not quite fit into the story yet.

I have also started on Lake House. It seems that on Friday night, my college son and his girlfriend decided they wanted to watch it, so I opened it and set it up. Then her phone rang, and he decided to get something else done while she was on the phone, and I decided to get something else done while awaiting them, and in the end she fell asleep on the couch and he decided not to watch it. I watched more than half an hour of it, but had to run a scheduled errand and never got back to it. However, it is already interesting, even if part of my interest stems from the fact that I was told something about it in advance which informs my understanding of one of the earliest scenes in the film. I’m already labeling it “Frequency by mail”, because it has that aspect of sending information through time.

Meanwhile, our intended Collision rehearsal collapsed, because the brakes on the new car quit, apparently blowing a major leak in the line to the rear brakes. My houseguests have concluded that this is not something they can fix here without a lift, so we are temporarily without a vehicle. On the other hand, they don’t think it will take long for a mechanic to fix it tomorrow, so that’s the plan.

In the midst of this, our washing machine decided to start spewing water onto the floor. This created a serious complication, as my wife has to have clean uniforms for work every day, and that includes doing laundry before tomorrow afternoon–not to mention that everyone else in the house needs clothes as well. Fortunately, our houseguests were able to find and repair that problem, so this is up and running. I must also extend my thanks to Grey Vanaman of Audio-clear, who has extended to us the use of one of his equipment transport vans to handle our necessary transportation.

I need to get a few things done before I lose the light, and figure out what I’m making for dinner, but hopefully I should be back to the forums before long.

–M. J. Young