Long Day

We started this morning with a trip down to traffic court where we waited two hours for Consuela to pay her fine. Not fun. Once we reached the front of the line we felt like we had been standing for so long that we had shrunk two inches. Plus there was the pleasure derived from overhearing everyone else's misery as they interacted with the clerks. One woman was disputing a contempt of court charge for failure to appear on the not unreasonable grounds that she was in prison at the time. She was told that, in order to dispute this charge, she must first pay the fine and then petition the judge to have the charge removed. She asked the clerk if she would get her money back when the charge was dropped. The answer, of course, was no. Also, when Consuela was finally admitted to the priviledge of forking over her cash, the cashier short changed her. This took some figuring but was thankfully resolved without violence.

Having wasted more of my morning than I had planned at traffic court happy land, I had to scramble back home to get to work on time. Last week I suspended a pair of inlfatable sharks from the ceiling in the children's room as part of our Splish Splash Read summer decorating theme. When I arrived, I discovered that one of the inflatable sharks had become unbalanced and instead of floating gracefully above us was now dangling by his tail with his head facing straight down as though he were diving towards the carpet. Several children were smacking him in the face as though he were a punching bag. I told them that, yes, that does seem to be the conventional wisdom regarding how one fends off a shark attack and then I righted the poor fish before the young pugilists could do any more damage.

It's busy today and I'm not even halfway through it. After this I have to help Dad move. I'll be up until the wee hours.