happy saturday?

my day:

up at 8 to take the car to the shop. i've noticed for a few weeks that my car vibrates severely when i brake. sometimes when driving i hear a strange rattling noise in the front right wheel, and once after parking in front of my house and going to investigate said wheel last week, i smelled a faint burning smell. so my guess was something was majorly wrong with the front brakes on the right side of the car, and i'd just drive slowly until i could get a car appointment and today was the day.

i dropped the car off at 8 and they told me they'd need it all day if they were doing oil change AND extra work since saturday is busy... fine... colleen followed me there and brought me home. around 10 i got a call from goodyear... indeed, the caliper on my front right brake wasn't engaging anymore so instead of putting energy into using friction to slow down the wheel, it's just been getting really hot and warping the front right rotor.

how good was my prediction, eh?

anyhow, the rotors are old and worn enough that it just made sense to replace both in the front, and both calipers along with it so that i had a symmetric set of brakes... that and adjusting the drum brakes in the back and changing out old brake fluid (hadn't been done in about 2 years so it was due) adds up to nearly $800... add the oil change, and i was $850 more in credit debt... that's exciting right?

that's not even the end of the story... my timing belt is cracking too. so when they get the parts in to replace that and the accessory belts this week, i'll get to bring the car right back in for more big $$ work. for two years of only needing oil changes and a new set of tires all around, this averages out to being a car that's been really good to me... but everything seems to need repairing in large groups instead of spread out and it hurts the pocketbook.

at least, for the first time in awhile, it felt really nice to drive a car home this afternoon with fully functional brakes.

anyhow, i digress... i started out with here's my day and wrote an essay about car repair.

so to the car place around 8. colleen followed me and brought me home.

i did stuff around the house, exercised, and other such fun until around 1. then colleen was leaving for the day. leigh was already gone on a "fall foilage drive", not to be heard from again until about 9pm, and other usual suspects are phone-less or out of town this weekend, so even though my car wasn't going to be ready til 5, i had colleen drive me to a wendys down the street from the car place where i studied for 3 hours, and then walked on down the street to check out the scoop on the car around 4:30.

car in hand again, it was back home, theoretically to grade my calc quizzes from this week, but i really just don't want to. i like when my students do well, and i'm a little sad for them when they don't, and i know this week i'm going to be generally sad for them because it was a hard week and a lot of them were frustrated and confused. anyhow, that didn't so much happen.

instead, you might remember that i was really mad last weekend when i found a counterexample to what i had been trying to prove for the past month. after telling my advisor what i had found, he still suggested i write up a short paper detailing my discovery even if it wasn't what i had hoped it would be, so i just spent the past 3 hours doing that. it's 3 pages and that's probably a little long for it, but just the same... it's harder to write math quickly since there's all the typesetting involved... even if you're good at TeXing things (math typesetting), it still takes time to compile every so often and decide if you like the layout on the page or if there's a way to type the symbols more clearly notation-wise, etc., etc., etc.

anyhow, paper done, and i sent it to my friend steve (who is a 1st year grad student in seattle this year), and will show it to leigh when i'm done blabbing, to get feedback on my writing clarity today.

basically, that's what i've done.

i've been so unmotivated lately. at leat i managed to do something today... i should definitely be grading for quite some time tomorrow.

my head's been weird lately too. i had some bizarre dreams last week -- for once NOT nightmares (in and of itself not having nightmares is bizarre for me), but they have me thinking about a few people a lot more regularly than i usually do because i have no idea what in my head sparked to dream of them in the context i did. (yes, that's extremely vague). so lots of self-analysis going on... i'm not sure if that's the right word, but on some level, i do mean "trying to figure out what's going on in my head", so that works. only i'm analyzing my subconscious head, which is much harder to do than to analyze conscious head. ;)

conclusion: i'm bizarre and like to write lots about car parts. all long posts by me should be generally disregarded as rubbish.