I got Piet’s oil kinda-sorta changed. I couldn’t find my filter wrench so that will have to go until the next oil change, at which time I expect I’ll end up going to Groovy Lube because they use Valvoline (although I’d rather not, because I came to dislike their sister garage operation). Or maybe I’ll buy a proper filter wrench instead.
I also dragged out the smoker and did two big racks of beef ribs, about eight pounds’ worth. Pulled ’em out about thirty minutes ago and let L taste-test them. She says they’re great, and the test bite she gave me from her sample was indeed good.
T is home from her spring-break ski trip to Breckenridge (Colorado, silly, not Texas!) and it was something of a mixed experience. She enjoyed getting to ride pillion on a snowmobile, but found, in the middle of her first ski lesson, that she will never, ever be able to be a skier. Her knees, which have given her trouble for years, won’t turn inward to the knock-kneed position needed to learn snowplow turns and stops, which is an utterly fundamental skill for skiers. She also could have done without twenty-two hours trapped in a bus with a bunch of junior high kids who were acting like junior high kids. However, she got home without having killed anyone more than once.
I have to get hold of the Workforce Commission tomorrow and see what I can toward trying to straighten out a mess that’s now been going on for two years, where they got hold of the idea that I was employed by someone for whom I actually just did some contract work. The story is long and complicated, but the upshot is that they were demanding I repay $2,700 of unemployment benefits I received in 2002 and 2003. I’ve got the hearings officer argued out of disallowing my appeal, but his decision says that I have to start all over with this and they still may end up demanding I repay the $2,700 anyway. As if I didn’t already have enough demands on my checkbook.
John Cage plays a variegated short story on the asphalt keyboard. Fnord.
