Happy Birthday Kathleen!

Kathleen-
It's your birthday! Hooray!

Yesterday I had what can only be described as a day from hell. I had to drive down to St. Peter for a job fair I was recruiting at, and I took Mike's car. Before I left, I went up to the nice tire place and got my soft drivers side (this is important later) tire pumped up. Halfway down, I heard a terrible thunking. "I remember this noise" I thought. "That sounds like the serpentine belt." Remember that?

So I called Mike, called a tow truck, and waited. And waited. Called my boss, called the Fair organizers to say I'd be late. The very nice tow truck guy pulled up, hooked up the car, and towed me to a car repair shop.

The very nice but intimidating head mechanic guy said "what do you think is wrong?" Very calmly, I said "I think the serpentine belt is shredded. I've been through this before with this car, and it sounded the same." He was skeptical.

So they open the hood, and a young mechanic came in and said "You think what? Everything looks fine." The head mechanic made him turn it on, and sure enough, I was right. The serpentine belt was shredded. One replaced serpentine belt later, I was back on my way.

Happily down the highway I went, and I pulled into St Peter. You have to go through downtown to get to the college, and as I stopped at the first traffic light, I heard a pop. I figured it was the air brakes of the giant truck behind me. Then I pulled out of the light, and heard thumping. So I pulled over again, got out, walked around to the passenger side, and my tire was FLAT. Not the tire that was soft earlier. Nope. The other front tire. And I have never seen such a flat tire.

So I looked around downtown St Peter, and walked into the nearest store, a cute little Swedish import store. So I said "I've got a flat tire, is there someone I can call to help?" So the nice lady behind the counter called the local repair shop. No answer. The ladies looked at eachother and said "we could call Don."

Don turns out to be the husband of one of the ladies who works in the shop (who wasn't there at this point). Without hesitation, Don agreed, and two minutes later, he pulled up. He looked at my tire, went home for some tools, came back, and had my tire off in a jiffy. Then he drove me down to Shorty's Tire Shop (By the way, Shorty is great), and Shorty looks at my tire and says I need a new one. So I buy a new tire, Don puts it on, and I thank him profusely. I go back into the shop to collect my thoughts before preceeding to the job fair, and the ladies made quite a fuss about how calm and collected I was given the day I'd had up to this point. (It's still only 11:30am).

The ladies decreed that given that the car that was so much trouble was Mike's, he should buy me a bauble from the shop. And so I picked out a pretty pair of earrings to bring home.

I did eventually make it to the job fair and home again safely, but this is all a long way of saying that I knit one single row yesterday.

Oy.

But happy birthday to you!