Automobile Woes
Thursday, February 22, 2007
Yes, it was another day for CLEP exams for Rose. This time, she would be wracking her brain for three hours over human growth and development and western civilization, down at the good old UMSL campus.
The fire inspector came through the buildings that day at work, critiquing the angles and degrees and heights and lengths and widths of things. Afterwards, is was concluded that the church and granary had passed their inspections, the office and youth buildings would require some minor tweaking (regarding exterior lighting), and the barn would need to be built up on the side with dirt, much dirt, in order to classify it as merely a one-story wooden building, and not a two-story wooden building. Thus the “no occupancy” currently designated for the barn.
Ivy left work two hours early for a doctors’ appointment. Loraine dropped off a plate of chocolate chocolate chip muffins for the whole staff. Judah arrived later from the seminary after having helped a member of the church arrange more details of his Christian rock concert being held at the church (a re-release of his band’s album first put out in 1972)…
After work, Collette dropped by with the Honda for an oil change. After both crewmen spent several dozen attempts on trying to close and latch the hood, it finally latched. Having been forewarned by one of them, that the Honda’s antifreeze protection level “was zero” and that it would “overheat very quickly”, Collette decided to drive home immediately and have OLeif fix it. Not long after leaving the parking lot, she pulled into Heartland Bank because of some smoke emitting from the hood. Having no cell phone, she walked into the bank and made three attempts to call the house. Mom finally picked up the phone and shortly later, Dad had arrived to inspect the problem. Neither he nor OLeif could quite figure out exactly what the crewman had meant by “zero protection” so Dad filled up the overflow a little and followed Collette home. Other than the car smelling funny at intervals, they finally pulled into the driveway and Dad looked at the engine a little while longer. Something was smoking from the bowels. However, there was no way to access the interior. Dad suspected there was some sort of trouble with the radiator. And then he had to hurry off to get to Francis’ Scout meeting; he was already dressed in his uniform for the evening.
It had just been one of those days…
Finally back at home, Collette went inside, opened a soda, sorted the laundry, and hoped for easier dealings the next day.
Meanwhile, at the end of the day, Rose had passed the one exam and didn’t quite make the cut on the other. Modern western civilization had never been kind to her. (It had also given Collette and Carrie a good amount of trouble.) But Rose still had a cumulative 48 credits, which was quite promising.
And Carrie’s manager just loved her apparently. He was concerned that she would burn herself out because she was so quiet and concentrated, taking one phone call right after another. Apparently this was an uncommon thing. But the customers liked her too, and it paid the bills for school and travel.
Back at work, OLeif was busy piecing together a brief slide show of past and upcoming youth events to present at the youth dinner and talent show fund raiser that Sunday night, in preparation for the mission trip in St. Louis, the junior high retreat to “The Zone” camp in Illinois, and the senior high retreat to North Carolina in June. Finding pictures of places they had not been to yet, was a rather difficult chore. Seeing as he was running short on time, OLeif bypassed that leaders’ meeting at the church that night, to work on gathering his pictures.