Crazification

This week­end I’m going to be direct­ing at the Notre Dame Fenc­ing Invi­ta­tion­al. It’s an easy way to make a cou­ple hun­dred dol­lars and an excuse to eat at CJ’s. I’m doing some seri­ous brush­ing up on my USFA rules, since I’ve not actu­al­ly fenced since I’ve grad­u­at­ed. [I can’t believe it.] The Invite is two long long days of fenc­ing, start­ing at 8 and usu­al­ly end­ing 8 or more hours lat­er, so I’ll def­i­nite­ly earn my cash. Since I’m leav­ing after work today, I had to accom­plish all the nor­mal stuff I do on the week­end last night. So I did my laun­dry, got my car ser­viced, et cetera. But the Lube Stop broke the valve stem in one of my tires, so I end­ed up hav­ing to put on the donut in the sleet­ing rain and dri­ve to NTB in Lake­wood for a replace­ment stem. The guy that fixed my car goes to the Greek Ortho­dox Church in Tremont, and anoth­er guy who was there wait­ing has a daugh­ter around my age that lives there.

I’m going to send a com­plaint to Lube Stop, and maybe next time I’ll get a free oil change. The whole affair killed about two hours of my time. Tremont West gave me a call because they’d like to send me to a lead­er­ship con­fer­ence in Nashville in May that is spon­sored by Neigh­bor Works. I stopped in to check out their new offices and explained that I’d like to go, but since my sta­tus in the Cleve­land is now unsta­ble that they should con­tin­ue ask­ing peo­ple, but to keep me in mind and that I’d keep them updat­ed.

I final­ly made it back to my apart­ment at about 7:45 and was able to shove some clothes in my overnight pack and snarf some left­over veg­etable stew before I had to meet up with Des and Steve at the Lit to dis­cuss the logis­tics of installing web­cams in tac­ti­cal spots in Tremont. Busiest Thurs­day I’ve had in a long time, I did­n’t even have a chance to think about run­ning.