Last Friday, I unintentionally kicked off a long holiday weekend when I took Montmorency, my Welsh Terrier, to the vet for his annual shots and some light cosmetic work (nail trimming). We had only been in the lobby for a minute or so when another pet owner pulled up in the parking lot and brought a small pet carrier inside with her.
"Is that your car?" she asked me.
"Yes?"
"It has smoke coming out of it."
I looked; so it did. Smoke was rolling out from beneath the hood, particularly on the driver's side. The smoke was white, not black, and there were no flames. Nevertheless, the situation didn't look good.
"I'll take Monty," offered a vet tech, "while you check out the car."
So that's what we did. Unfortunately, I was unable to find the lever in the cabin that would release the hood latch. I dug the owner's manual from the glove compartment, checked the index, and turned to page 11-5 to find the location of the handle. I still couldn't find it, so I called my mechanic and let him know what was going on. He seemed appropriately concerned.
As luck would have it, by driving to the vet we had traveled a good bit of the way towards my mechanic's shop. So after Montmorency Jerome received his shots, had some blood drawn to check his kidney function, and received a nail clipping, we hopped back into the car to drive it to my mechanic. Monty settled down quickly on the new route and was surprisingly calm.
After I parked the car, white smoke billowed out from under the hood and liquid dripped onto the pavement. Perfect!
The car was quickly diagnosed with a failed radiator. I accepted the keys to a loaner car for an indeterminate amount of time, Monty took the opportunity to jump on almost every mechanic in the shop, and then we were homeward bound. I made a quick trip to campus under threat of an approaching severe storm to check out a laptop so that I'd be able to work from home if the need arose. But this being summer and a Friday, there wasn't enough work to do to call it a day. So I called it a vacation day instead — though it didn't turn out to be much of a vacation as we ducked and covered through multiple thunderstorms. (Overnight, a raccoon got into the electrical equipment of my campus town and took out the electricity for 3,000 homes in the area, including ours. It probably took itself out as well.)
Saturday — did it rain again? I don't remember hearing any sirens except for the noon whistle. Sunday afternoon brought a fast-moving and severe storm to our area, and this time we (Eldest and Dog and I) did spend some time in the basement listening to the weather radio and checking the radar app on my iPhone. A tornado touched down somewhere south of us, but the larger storm passed us by and only took a few small branches from the tall, mature trees that surround our house.
Impossible Read update: After a week or two of being too busy (and spending too much time driving) to make time for The Mists of Avalon, this weekend I curled up in my big green chair and read chapters 4 and 5, bringing me to page 72. I really should try to read a little bit of it each day — even if I can't read a whole chapter, and even if I find that I need to re-read the paragraphs that I read the day before.
In other reading news, I finished Amanda Gorman's collection Call Us What We Carry and read two chapters in Jack Kornfield's book After the Ecstasy, the Laundry. I have enjoyed reading at least one poem a day and never thought I could say I read through two big collections of poetry (the other one was Mary Oliver's collection Devotions). So I'm going to keep up the habit by starting Translations from the Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke. I'll probably go through this book by re-reading the previous day's poem and then doing a first read of the next poem.
Knitwise, I have made steady progress on the Secret Knitting Project, especially during the various sessions for the Grand Prix of Monaco. At the moment I am exactly halfway through the third of eight stages, and Stage 8 is the assembly of the project. I can't share any photos yet, but I will do so at the end of June. The third stage has been particularly rough on my hands, wrists, and arms, so I will try to knit in shorter stints and take more breaks.
The Secret Project has a hard deadline, so I can't afford to distract myself with other knitting until it has been completed. If every other knitting project were as urgently made... well, that's a story for another universe and I'm stuck in this one for now. If I really want distraction I will have to be satisfied with moving my yarn stash and project bags around as I tidy and reorganize my bedroom.
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