So, the second of my two spring breaks is over, and I now have exactly four more weeks of class before my law school career is over.

Wow.

Scary.

The e-mail gods have been pissed off little buggers in my share of the cybervoid. All week, I've been getting messages out of order, days late, completely unsure whether any of mine have been getting out there.

I don't really know what to do about it, except grin and bear it until I get set up with access in Kansas City. I currently get it free through the school, and I'm not ready to start paying for anything sooner than I have to. But I'll certainly be ready to ditch the free 'net services.

Actually, they've worked pretty well for me up until this past week, but that just shows you how impatient I am. I blame the internet, frankly. All the instant gratification has made me completely unable to deal with the most minor inconveniences.

I have to work on that.

My father told me yesterday to clean out my car, because when they get back from Hilton Head, he's going to trade cars with me and go take care of everything that's wrong with it before I move.

I'm not sure he understands exactly what that entails.

1. The passenger side door lock is missing. I mean the entire lock mechanism on the outside is gone -- there's just a hole. It's been this way since Thanksgiving of 1995, when my car was broken into in my L.A. apartment parking lot while I was back home. They stole my car phone and CD tape adapter. They made $600 worth of calls on the phone. Not sure what they got for the tape adapter.

2. The driver's side door lock is broken. This started over the summer, when I noticed that the "open door" light on the dashboard was coming on even when the door was closed. I turned my dome light to the permanent off position (since it would flash on in time with the dashboard light) and forgot about it. Occasionally, I would notice the sound of small pieces of metal hitting gravel when I opened the door, but because I hate my car, I generally didn't care.

Then something went terribly wrong, and the lock started engaging every time I drove over a bump. Now, I have to roll down the window and unlock my door from the outside every time I want to get out of my car. I don't see this as much of a problem, because now I never lock my keys in the car. I just have to be careful not to drop the keys when I'm trying to unlock the car, because then I have to go through the whole crawl-into-the-passenger-seat thing.

3. Last week, on my way to Mark and Katherine's, I finally faced the horrid nightmare that is my trunk.

Over the past few months, I had noticed a vaguely mildewy smell coming from the trunk, and also that everything in the trunk was, well, wet. Using my sharply defined powers of deduction, I decided that a plastic gallon of water that I kept in the trunk for emergencies had sprung a slow leak. I took everything out of the trunk (which was only a package of legal pads and some old tapes, all of which were ruined with moisture) and promptly ignored it, hoping it would eventually dry out.

Well, pretty soon I noticed the the floor of the backseat of my car was wet too. Not just damp, but sopping. I bought some rags at Home Depot and mopped up as much as I could. Then, finally, last week, I went to the self-serve car wash and opened the trunk.

I peeled back the soaked upholstery, pulled out the soaked piece of cardboard covering the spare tire, and gaped in horror at said spare tire, which was completely submerged in water.

I pulled the tire out and stared at the gallons of water sitting in the bottom of the trunk, wondering what I was going to do about it, when the nice old man from the car wash office came over to see what I was up to.

He surveyed the situation, asked to borrow the rubber gloves that I had brought for the occasion, and found a handy-dandy plug in the bottom of the trunk.

Whoosh. Out came all the water. I dropped the spare tire, the soaking wet upholstery, and the cardboard back into the trunk and headed to Katherine and Mark's, where I was able to lay all of it out to dry in their yard.

Then Mark and I conducted a test to see where the hell all that water was coming from. Turns out the little accident I had in Susannah's parking lot back in, oh, October, where I smashed my taillight, had pushed the light into the truck just enough to break the seal between it and the body of the car. So a good part of the precipitation that had fallen on my car in the past six months had run off into my trunk.

Yuck. Fortunately, being that Mark is an engineer in home remodeling mode, he was all over it with a caulk gun. No more rain in the trunk. Yay.

But, the taillight still needs to be fixed.

4. Finally, there is the fact that the car is completely illegal, and, if what Patrick says is true in Massachusetts is true in Pennsylvania, then I, the future officer of the court, could be hauled off to jail if I ever got pulled over.

I didn't get PA tags until nine months after my California tags had expired. But in PA you also have to get an emissions inspection, which I never have done. And then, as of January 31, my tags expired once again. And oh, look at the smart young woman with an entire week of vacation drive her little illegal car to the DMV and fix it. Bah ha ha.