i have paid my Careless Tax

So I meant to transfer money from the savings to the checking last week to cover an unusually large Visa bill that was going to hit yesterday. Somehow I didn't quite get to the end of the process, and the transfer didn't go through (which I'd have realized if I'd paid attention to the fact that I didn't get the usual e-mail confirmation), and the payment did, and yeah, there's some red pixels in there now. I've taken care of it, and I am as usual grateful to be in a place where the overdraft fee is more of a nuisance than a disaster, but for fuck's sake, I had a great weekend and then suddenly I'm coming down with this new cough-cold-strep-like thing and I fucked up the balance sheet and, argh.

In good news, though, which frankly wipes out all the bad news of all kinds, I CAN HAS PARKING SPACE. I decided aaages ago that I'd bite the bullet and shell out for reserved parking (but not covered parking), and I got on the waiting list, and I am finally off the waiting list and have paid the money and put the sticker in my car and they can't take it away from me, that parking space is mine! Plus it's not the one I thought it was, on the end where I'd stand a chance of getting slightly parked in by people getting cute with the boundary on the end of the parallel parking spaces. It's a couple of spaces in from the end, between my car-friends the red Mini and the orange Honda Fit, and seriously, barring miraculous healing of all upper respiratory issues, I could not be happier.

for international women's day

It pleases me that it is both (a) International Women's Day and (b) Tuesday, which is the night every week when the women's league curls at my club. :-) For International Women's Day, I will retell this story:

One of my college roommates, L, has three children - two girls and a boy. This new year's, I was visiting her family and we went one night to her parents' house, so that she and I could go to the hockey game with her dad and (mainly) so she could drive her folks to the airport early in the morning, where they were going to visit his mother, who was ill. L returned from the airport and went back to sleep, allowing her older daughter to sit in the bed with her and watch TV with headphones. The boy was still zonked out. So when the younger daughter (the middle child) woke up, I went to get her so she wouldn't wake the whole house calling for her grandmother, who was of course not there.

L's mother - a brilliant, formidable, tremendously professional woman - has an impressive collection of nutcrackers, which spend December lined up shoulder to shoulder across the top of the entertainment center. She's going to have to find someplace else to put them, soon; they're two deep at the edges and if she adds any more you won't be able to see them. Anyway, Middle Child J, who is three and a half, and I were sitting quietly in the living room, and talking about her sister and brother and Christmas presents and how she's not allowed to play with the nutcrackers, and then she looks at the nutcrackers for a minute and tilts her head to one side and says, "Where are all the girls?"

curling.

I asked two people if they could spare for me tonight, because I felt like crap, but neither of them could do it and my team was supposed to bring snacks, as well - so I bit the bullet, thanked merciful fate for my Brand New Reserved Parking Space, and went along. I knew it would be good for me to get out of the house, in any case.

Only I couldn't breathe deeply enough to call for sweeping so my girls could hear me - not without triggering a lengthy and painful coughing fit. So they could call to me, and I could only communicate with hand signals until they got close enough to hear me speaking fairly quietly. We won the toss and gave up a steal of one in the first. And then we took six in the second, stole four over the next three ends, gave them a single in the sixth, took three in the seventh, and played the eighth even though we were up 13-2 because ties are broken by percentage of ends won, so we sort of had to. (They got one and we were all glad.)

Might have to consider the mostly-silent method more often.