saturday, september 4, 1999

Holiday weekend? What holiday weekend? See, I have to go to school on Monday, so it's just like any other weekend to me. I'm used to it by now, and it means we get the Tuesday after Columbus Day off as well. I'd rather have a four-day weekend two months after school starts than a three-day weekend two weeks after school starts. I took my mentee to breakfast this morning. She's a first year from way out of the state, and she went to KU, just like me. I hadn't seen her since school started, so I called and asked if she'd let me treat her to breakfast at our local breakfast place and find out how her first two weeks are. She's very sweet. I spent two hours on the phone with her before she moved here, and I knew exactly what she looked like from her voice, all blonde hair and blue eyes. She's not a bubble-head, though. She's already dating a second-year and going through the problems that that entails in our little high/law-school community, but otherwise she seems to like it. She's a little wisp of a thing, though, and when we were discussing what we were getting, she said she had decided on one plain pancake and a side of bacon. To her credit, the pancakes are approximately eight inches in diameter. But still. When I eat there with my other friends, we usually get eggs and potatoes and bacon and toast, a whole big slew of a plate of food, one where you can actually feel your arteries clog as you eat. I always feel justified, because I do walk to the restaurant. (Okay, it's three blocks. But still.) Not today. Today I had one blueberry pancake and a side of bacon. I walked to the restaurant from my apartment, and I was about halfway home when I stopped dead in my tracks, because I had just realized that I had forgotten to tip the waitress. I turned right around and went back. I couldn't believe it. It wasn't even as though I got up from the table thinking I would go back after I got change at the cashier, which I did need to do. It just didn't cross my mind to even leave one. I gave her $3 on a $10 tab. I felt terrible. I'm only 27, for God's sake. I shouldn't be forgetting to leave tips. A rather disturbing thing happened to me while I was updating the page on Thursday night. I was moving some files around in the filemanager at Tripod. I clicked to go into the "sep99" file, when it then told me that such a file did not exist. I sat staring stupidly at the page until I saw that it was telling me that a "sep99" file didn't exist within someone else's directory. I mean, suddenly I was in a whole other member's files. That's a bit problematic. I of course just closed my browser and then went and relogged into Tripod, but the potential was there for me to completely destroy someone else's site. And that means that the potential is there for someone else to completely destroy my site. I wrote the owners of the page that I had gotten into, just to tell them what had happened and assure them that I hadn't done anything to their files. I then wrote a strongly worded e-mail to Tripod, demanding to know what the problem is. Well, of course they haven't written back yet. I can't really threaten anything, because to move this page somewhere else would be way too much of a hassle for me. But still, I feel I am owed a response. God is making me clean my apartment. Not directly, mind you, no burning bushes or anything. But I have a flat tire, and that's good enough. See, I'm still driving my mother's car from the trip to Annapolis, because she went home with my aunt to visit for the week. But now she's home and wants her car back. I went out last night to go rent a movie (yes, I'm lame, but all my friends are out of town so I had an excuse to be lame) and suddenly realized that I wasn't really going anywhere. I pulled back over and there you are, a flat tire. Anyway, this means the potential for a parental visit. I think my parents have AAA, so maybe they can just send someone out to put on the spare which will get me the tire store located a convenient three blocks from my house (across the street from the breakfast place, actually). But if they don't, that means my dad will have to come and do it (changing tires is boy work, and don't try to tell me otherwise), which means he'll have to come in, which means that everything has to be perfect because he'll want to use the bathroom and one must pass through every room in the house except the kitchen to get to the bathroom. But I've been really needing to do it for a while, so I'm taking the flat tire as a sign from God that I really ought to do it now. So off I go. Really. I'm going to clean the apartment now. Right after lunch.