There is as yet no word on the truck, beyond that the garage is backed up and turning away work (one of their mechanics had a baby this past weekend (actually, his wife had the baby, but he’s out for the week) and they are very much backlogged). Our houseguest got his car back today, timing chain intact, although I am waiting for the check from his mother to cover what I paid on it. I had thought this would mean that we could return the rental and that as long as one of the other two cars come through we Ubercon would happen–but the lady who controls the vehicles has said not to return the rental until at least one of the other two cars comes through, and the way she sounds she won’t want me going unless there is a car for me and a car for her, so things are still looking rather grim. On the bright side, she is off on Thursday, so if we have the truck and the new car is ready she can get me to it. On the dark side, someone has already tried to get her to commit to being somewhere else that night, and our son who comes home during the week needs to return to Delaware that night, so it’s not going to be simple.

I would love to say that I am otherwise ready to go, but with all the confusion and complication all I can say is that I paid up the cell phone and ordered copies of my own books (What Does God Expect? and About the Fruit, which have not yet arrived). I’m not sure what happens next. I have not given up on getting to the convention, but I am not encouraged by the situation to this point.

–M. J. Young

Today was marked by a trip to court for another member of the household; since we’re still working with the rental, I had to drive. The truck turns out to be bad news–not the starter, the flywheel, which means several hundred dollars to pull the transmission to get to it. Ah, well–we agreed that we need the truck, if only to get trash to the dump.

It also means that the trip to Ubercon has been seriously jeopardized; we have three cars any one of which might or might not be done by Thursday, and we must have two on the road to make it work. Odds are slim.

Sitting in court gave me time to do a fair amount of editing on the Romans notes. I confess, however, that my mind was a bit frazzled, and I did not feel that I was giving it the attention required. Here’s hoping I haven’t missed some glaring problems in my failure to grasp what I was reading.

After that, I still had to get my mother-in-law to the store; my wife wanted to go along, but that meant we had to take our youngest son, so that we could feed him. That became more complicated, and it was after eleven thirty that we managed to get home. Mercifully I had been able to get the e-mail done in the cracks before and after court, so I’m drawing near the end of the night. Unfortunately, I’m not really getting things ready for the convention, and I’m running out of time.

On another note, I stumbled upon a DVD of Sliding Doors for ten bucks, and since that’s a movie about which I get a fair amount of mail (my Temporal Anomalies fans keep telling me that I need to see it even though it is not a time travel film), I decided to add it to my growing stack of films. I’m not sure when I’ll get the chance to watch it, but at least I’ve got it.

–M. J. Young