And...that was the best way the worst way could turn out.

I officially went over her head for the first time ever, and she caught me. I got half the question out before she came by, and she stopped and came in, and our boss set a threshold which would trigger the manual file move. She did say she didn't want to dwell on things going wrong, and I said I wanted to have common expectations across the board, and he said he didn't want to know the details about our "tense conversation" (my words) and also I look awful.

I just crossed the conversational line with a co-worker. Oops!

I was talking about some recent issue with rented laptops that had webcam recording software running, and I was hypothesising what a horrible violation that was. "I mean, suppose they're feeding the pictures to a porn site? And you're all...Mom! What are you doing on here??"

He's looking balefully at me. I say "What?" His reply: "I don't know what I am doing on here."

Like how? What advice did they give that was useful?

Like, since my job doesn't match my 401K contribution, I should stop it and put that money into paying off my credit cards instead. Also, he's going to help me deal with all my old retirement plans. And look into disability insurance, because that's what would ruin me.

I think mostly I liked it because it was mostly about moving around money I'm already putting out somewhere. And he was nice. Although I half wonder if my mother suggested me because he's single.

Although I half wonder if my mother suggested me because he's single.

I see an early retirement in your future if you know what I mean and I think you do.

Eh, where he lives is not transit-accessible.

Deal breaker.

So today we went car shopping. My car decided it wanted to be a completely forward-thinking machine and stopped going in reverse. Rather than pay at least $300 to fix it, we decided to see what was out there in affordable used cars.

I scanned the website of the local dealership that caters to poor people with bad credit and found that $4000 cars could be had for a monthly payment of $50 for 60 months (yes, there are better deals, but money is the deciding factor once we find something that won't fall apart in three months).

We started out to their lot today, then Hubby decided to pull into the local used car lot of the biggest dealer in the state. We looked around a bit, and I saw that none of their cars have prices on them. We tell the salesman the amount we're looking at and what payment we'd like. He points us to a couple of cars. One car he fixates on is a very nice 7-year-old Saturn, manual transmission, nothing obviously wrong with it. However, it's been so long since I've driven a manual that I can't take it for a test drive. Hubby had just had another hip procedure, so he couldn't do.

We look at an Oldsmobile of teh same vintage, obviously has been well-used, I drive it around the block, it feels pretty good. Hubby was looking at some other cars while I was driving.

We go inside to start crunching numbers. After filling out some forms, he comes back and tells us that the first car we looked at is priced at $10,000 with a monthly payment of $250. We tell him that's way outside the price range we asked for. He shows us the wonderful Carfax report. We repeat that the price is way out of line. He goes away for a bit and comes back with the price $2000 lower, but the monthly payment is still $200.

We're three hours into this by now, and I'm getting peeved that he's not hearing us saying what we're saying--and to give him good marks, he didn't try to "little lady" me or anything like that. He just keeps trying to nudge us up on the payment, points out that banks won't give us a better rate on that car, that no one will finance a $4000 car, etc. I tell him what I found at the other dealership, and he got a very sour look on his face. He tried to talk them down, and I told him that we still weren't going to be paying what he was quoting.

Kudos to my beloved Hubby, he just said "She's in charge of the finances, I turned it all over to her when my heart went weird and I couldn't deal with the stress anymore. If she says we can't do it, we can't do it."

And the salesman still kept trying to get us to agree to a payment higher than what we told him! I got up and walked away from the desk at that point, leaving Hubby to do his soothe the waters thing. I didn't care at that point. I know the salesman was doing his job, which has to be a thankless one. If he hadn't fixated on the Saturn--he never did run the numbers on the Olds I actually drove--or took us at our word on what we wanted to pay, it would have been much nicer.

However, I never felt impatient with Hubby, and I'm very pleased with our united front. And apparently our credit is sufficient for a loan for a $10,000 car, at least.

I would go with an m-dash or colon. But I find the longer I teach, the less I correct individual grammar errors in student papers. There's usually bigger fish to fry.

SO TRUE. I don't correct much grammar. I'm too busy trying to fix the weak, shoddy thinking.

Yesterday my colleagues and I double scored 1000 essays. We had all assigned the same prompt to all of the students at my school. So we scored them together. It was exhausting but thought provoking. Also, good to give a score with no comments.

Today's xkcd is potentially heart breaking.

[link]

SO TRUE. I don't correct much grammar. I'm too busy trying to fix the weak, shoddy thinking.

Well, when you're teaching grammar and punctuation, those are the fish in question.