Journal of a Sabbatical

September 24, 1999

AJ 2000

Link of the Day: Danube River Basin

Today's Starting Pitcher: Bret Saberhagen

Today's Reading: Danube by Claudio Magris

Lizzy came bounding up the front stairs asking "When are they going to find the Auntmobile?" I told her they'd already found it and there isn't much left of it. She wanted to know if my birding stuff was still in it, and I had to admit I don't know yet. I still haven't seen the car. The guy at the towing place said it was still on police hold for fingerprinting and neither I nor the insurance adjuster can look at it yet. I gave the phone number of the towing company to the insurance people this morning and set about doing all the errands I didn't get to yesterday before it was time to meet the kids.

Lizzy suggests I should get a brand new car so it will always have been an auntmobile. I don't really want to call it Auntmobile or Stanley-3. My former vehicle had two names. The Stanley name goes back to the first Honda I bought. A friend had just read an article about how the head of Honda Motors attributed his success to not having family members in the business. This was at a time when DEC founders Ken and Stan Olsen were having some disagreements, and for some reason Stan's extension was the same as mine but with a different prefix and I was getting a lot of misdialed calls for people who wanted to yell at Stan. On hearing of Honda's success secret, I exclaimed "Aha, there's no Stan Honda!" So of course I had to name my car Stan but it seemed more like a Stanley. Subsequent Stanley's were named after the manner of variable names in COBOL programs: Stanley-2, Stanley-3. But, as usual, I digress.

I ask the kids whether I should get a new car or a used one. Lizzy favors new. Andrea favors used because it would be cheaper and more interesting. Suggested cars: another Honda or a VW Beetle.

Since I don't want to call the new one Auntmobile, Lizzy proposes a new name: AJ 2000. I like it. Andrea likes it. Now all I have to do is find a car that lives up to such a spiffy name.

Lizzy is attending a sleepover party tonight so it's just me and Andrea for dinner. Andrea hates pizza so this rules out the Uno's pizza in the fridge. I suggest ziti but Andrea thinks that's too difficult for me:

AJ: What does it take to cook ziti?
Andrea: A brain.

She wants a cup of tea, Sleepytime, and we learn to my surprise that apparently I can't even boil water for tea correctly. For supper, we finally settle on ramen, which she pronounces ray-men. This also requires boiling water ... someday I guess I'm going to have to take cooking lessons with the brain installed.

After supper, Andrea reads Harry Potter and I look through the Pottery Barn catalog for the perfect furniture item to make my living room finally come together.

After Andrea goes to bed, I flip through channels on the TV and find the end of the Red Sox game. They lost. I switched to a channel with very young children performing Twelfth Night - Malvolio looked to be about 10 years old. They weren't very good so I switched to the school committee meeting. The young Shakespearean thespians had better diction than the school committee members.

And so it goes...