P.S. There were SO MANY bunnies in my parents' yard this weekend.

The good news is that the library's wifi is good enough to stream Netlix. The bad news is that watching Parks and Rec is way more interesting than working.

On Saturday I hit up Office Max to buy envelopes, labels, ink, and stamps so I can get the first round of donation requests letters out for CJ's search and rescue team (I'm the Silent Auction organizer this year). Anyway, it was a total of about $160 worth of stuff. I zapped my card and it was declined. I checked my account on my phone and the expected money was in my accounts. We tried running it as credit - declined. Finally wrote a check, but since they get checks so rarely these days (and frankly I was suprised I had my checkbook in my purse) that they had to look up the process. While they did that I tried to call my credit union to see wtf was going on. They were eventually able to run my check as an electronic payment and I got my stuff. Never go through to the credit union.

I meant to call them again yesterday but forgot. Today they answered on the first ring. "Oh, yeah, our system was down Saturday". Gee, thanks. I was worried it had been blocked for fraud or something, was embarassed even though the Office Max folks were great about the whole thing, and it was an oooops? Grrrrrr.

Why is it that the office went from Freezing (I swear - just on Friday) to boiling with no in between???

Also - I am amused to find a thoroughbred filly bred by Lannister Holdings.

Huh. I'd forgotten that I signed up for "Marriage and the Movies: A History" at Coursera: [link]

There's a word in this document that I think is short for "assembly." Unfortunately, that word is "assy".

I drive stick and have since I was a teenager, when I had a shot at a babysitting job that came with a manual transmission car in which to run the kids around. This was the babysitting job that contributed significantly to my decision never to have kids, but at least I got a minor auto skill out of it. The cars I've owned have mostly been stick, because it's been cheaper, and I've been under the impression that manual transmissions last a bit longer than automatic ones. Since I try to keep my cars until they're 10+ years old and 150K+ miles, that's important to me. (I understand it's less of an issue with some automatic transmissions now.) I'm not wild about stop-and-go traffic up a hill, but it does make keeping my speed down in slow areas easy. (If my car's in 3rd it gets a bit loud when it goes over 30mph, in 4th it gets a bit loud when it's over 40 mph. Since I don't have cruise control, this helps me keep my speed from creeping up when a good song's playing.) And I understand manual transmission cars can have better gas mileage, unless you're using the lower gears to gun it.

The high point of my car driving ability was being able to parallel park on a steep hill in SF facing nose-down. That was fucking tricky. Gravity was a harsh mistress.

Three on the tree on a pickup was also interesting, as was moving my sister in a 20-foot U-Haul with stick.

All in all, I'm glad to have automatic transmission in San Francisco.

I'm sorry to hear your thriving specimen is badly placed.

I meant to say, -t, worry not for my azalea, my sister convinced me to hang on until next weekend when she will help me trim all the bushy bushes back to something manageable, so the azalea will probably live and continue to thrive.

I rarely even notice that I'm starting facing up or down a hill, I'm so used to it. Also because I know my manual like the back of my hand, so just how much to step on the clutch and how much to push the gas pedal down.

That said, when I rented an automatic when my toe was broken, I hardly noticed the difference, aside from a couple incidents of trying to clutch a non-existent pedal.