Sometimes I pretend to be normal, but it gets boring so I go back to being me.

We entered the Afghan war 10 years ago today.

TheSamba.com is a site for owners of classic VW's of all types and an invaluable source of info for a restoration project like mine. I go to the forum section for owners of '58-'67 Bugs to ask questions and get answers to issues I encounter as I restore Ilsa. Sometimes I go there just to read other's questions and answers so I learn about things that might come up. This morning someone posted a question about mounting a wench (sic) to the front bumper of his Beetle. You can guess where that discussion went. Last I looked nobody had addressed his intended question; they were having too much fun with his spelling error.

In the (sic) department, one of the questions on the assignment I graded this morning asked how Moses' mother hid him as a baby. OK, there are Sunday School teachers or handouts or something perpetuating a rather imaginative revision of that biblical narrative. Four or five of the adults in my class wrote that Moses' mother put him in a basket and sent him floating down the Nile. Huh?? But my favorite was the one that said "she sailed him down the Nile." I laughed 'til I cried. The visual imagery there...

That bit of creative writing aside, I am so proud of my class. We post sound files of each week's message and the class on our website. Someone who lives in another city listened to last week's class and, in an email conversation, speculated that they have handouts they're filling in. She said that because she could hear them telling me to wait before I proceeded to the next item in my lesson. I wrote back that they asked me to stop because they were taking notes of what I'd put up on a slide. Taking notes! When was the last time you heard of adults in a Sunday School class taking notes and halting the teacher so they could get info written down?

I got the exhaust system hooked up today. All that remains is the generator belt and I think she's ready to start up. OK, I need a battery first, but other than that.... I call Pat tomorrow to find out if I pick up the wheels Sunday afternoon, and if so I'll get tires next week. That will allow me to drop it off the jack stands and roll it in & out of the garage. Assuming that happens I may call Steve about coming out next Saturday for that initial fire.
(oops. That's not a word you're supposed to use with a classic VW.)

During college I worked at a now defunct men's clothing store. Richman Bro.s was a moderately priced chain in the midwest similar to The Men's Wearhouse, and the mall outlet where I worked was small enough that they only had two full-time and three or four part-time salesmen. The part-timers agreed - we hated getting put on the Friday night shift. The only people in the mall were losers who didn't have friends and had nothing better to do than roam the mall looking but not buying. We never made any commission money on Friday nights.

Here I sit, 37 years later, watching stoopid shows on TV wishing there was a mall nearby.