On having a shitty day...

Today was shitty. We've all had them, I guess, and in my case they're few [knock wood]--at least, when they're due to things that don't occur only inside my head. But, rare as they are, today was a truly shitty day.

At work, there's been no rain for going on a month. No rain, and the grass doesn't grow. No grow, no mow, so things have been slow. We've been picking up work here and there landscaping, and today we began a project that looks to be truly monumental, even more so now that a) the 10-day forecast shows an outlook of temperatures climbing into the giddy 90's without a hint of rain in sight and b) we're inexplicably down a man.

Tonight, I had a dinner engagement with a colleague at St. Francis, the purpose of which was to read the anonymous reviews we asked our students to complete for us at the very end of the year. I simply passed out little slips of white paper to my students and had them drop them into a slot in a well-duct-taped box on my desk. My colleague--Mary Feltes--did the same. I read hers to her and she read mine to me. To be blunt, mine were brutal. I deserved them, I guess--everything my students said about me rang pretty true. If you're one of my students and you're reading this, thank you for your candor, and I will try to do better in the future.

To cap things off, I got home at around 11:00 p.m. and decided to walk up to the local Tuffy Auto Service Center to collect the Dragon. You all know the Dragon by now if you've read my previous ramblings. She's still in pretty good shape--not great--but lately it had developed this heavy vibration at speeds over 30 mph. Tuffy said it was universal joints. I could have done it myself, I guess, and thank Tuffy for the diagnosis, but we all know my success rate with things mechanical of late, so the job, I felt, is better left to professionals.

After a good long walk on a beautiful early summer evening, during which I had a lot of time to think about the whole teaching thing, I got to the parking lot at Tuffy and I saw this:



Cool, huh? Well, I ain't walking home, so nothing left to do but change the fucker.

Have you ever used the tire-changing gear on a car of early vintage? More likely than not, the answer is no, and the reason is probably that no one does it that way anymore because it's freaking insanely dangerous. Here's what the jack looks like:



Keep in mind that the Dragon weighs almost 5,000 pounds. I gotta use this thing? What's particularly cool is that, when the car's whole ass is off the ground, and you're pulling on the wheel to take it off (or pushing on the spare to put it on) the whole thing wobbles alarmingly. Could you imagine using this on a gravel shoulder in the rain? No doubt our parents or grandparents had to do this at least once, and I appreciate their sacrifices all the more now.

Once the Dragon's large green ass is safely back on terra firma, I notice that the spare is not quite inflated to the proper operating pressure, so it's off to the gas station to top it off. After this is done, I take the thing out on the expressway. Thank God, at least the boys at Tuffy did something right--the old beast is back to her old ways of long, low and smooth, eating up the asphalt and sucking down a gallon of gas every 10 miles or so.

Hopefully tomorrow will be better.