Yesterday was pretty busy though I didn’t think it would be at the outset. My intention was to go to Walmart and come back, help Mum with some school work and generally veg given I still have the dregs of this cold that’s hanging on. Except fate didn’t let things go that way. First my car wouldn’t start, which wouldn’t have been an issue except I discovered this after hubbie had left to go to his chiropractor appointment.
Just then Mum called to say she was on her way out to pay some bills, but could she stop by and drop off her laptop first and then come back for the tutoring. I told her what was going on with the car, so she stopped by and jumped the car for me. Given I really needed to go to Walmart so that the cats wouldn’t starve and so that I could pick up more cold meds she invited me on the days journey with her saying we could stop by Walmart while going round and about for her errands. So I asked if she would meet me at the mechanic so I could drop the car off. While the car being dead isn’t something he could fix (she just tends to do that if she’s not driven every other day) her dying reminded me that she was almost 1000 miles over for her oil change which isn’t good as old as she is.
So, plan in place we set off, after I picked up a few things that were leftover from our neighbor’s yard sale. She invited us to pick through the leavings, which worked out in my favor because I picked up a 1 and 1/2 gallon fish tank to transfer our fish into so that I could give their 10 gallon tank a mega-clean out and major overhaul, which it has needed for some time. I’ve been so not with it the past couple of weeks that their tank evaporated down to about 5 gallons of water. So, now given there’s only two of them left they’re in their spiffy new home and will probably stay there for the duration. The filter for the mini tank is SO much quieter than the old one was even when the tank was full.
The fish in their new “penthouse”. Once I get the other cleaned out I may get some guppies for it BUT we’ll have to see, given taking care of it in the first place proved to be a chore I couldn’t entirely handle at the moment, and given they’re technically the munchkin’s fish his behavior needs to have a major overhaul before he gets any more pets. He’s been in a very Testing All Boundaries frame of mind lately.
Anyway, our day continued, we stopped by our insurance place so Mum could pay a bill there and chatted with the agent for a while catching up. She offered to do auto insurance quotes for Kore as she’s been having some issues with her former company and recently switched to what she hopes is a better one. Then we swung by SECO so Mum could pay another bill. Then she took us out to the Chinese Buffet, and I drank almost an entire pot of their Jasmine Green Tea because it was so, so good on my poor aching throat.
Then it was Walmart, where munchkin really started in on the boundary testing, much the same as he’d been doing at the mall the on Saturday, so there were stern words, punishments, apparent acceptance of limits and then more testing. At least he’s accepting that he has to hold hands in parking lots now without a huge tantrum, but he still wants to run off into the depths of stores possibly to be never seen again.
It was mathematics time after that, which is a bit strange. I haven’t done math in any capacity more than balancing a check book, which I don’t do nearly so often as I probably should, since high school. I did all my college math requirements during my senior year of high school, and being an English/Comm major didn’t have to do anything more than the CLAST while I was at Flagler. I did flirt with math briefly when I took the GRE for graduate school; but that was mostly done on auto-pilot in the sense of “someone in here knows how to do this,” and they did, and it’s generally not understood how but we did better on the math portion than the English portion by 20 points, so it worked.
The math in question is ‘pre-Algebra’ which is not really a term I recognize given in high school in England we just did “math” and when we moved to the States I was put into math courses here in Trigonometry/Analytical Geometry, then I went into Calculus and AP Calculus. I seem to be doing okay helping Mum with it (I hope). It’s a bit ‘I don’t understand the descriptive terminology but I get the theory and am hopefully explaining it okay.
We picked up my car and it’s had another issue that is probably sealing it’s death warrant, given expensive repairs don’t entirely seem worthwhile on a 13 year old vehicle. We’re discussing options. The idea of becoming a one-car family has come up before given I’m not working again, and that would save us on insurance what I’m no longer making on my paycheck.
The day finalized with me getting Kore to help me re-dye my hair; but that’s a tale for a separate post.
