So very busy. Hundreds of papers to mark, but there is always something pulling me into other orbits: car to the garage, grocery shopping, planning lessons for tomorrow, blah, blah; and now, Christmas shopping. The five-week progress report grades are due Monday, so I'll be cloistered in my apartment this weekend, making the InPile shrink and the GradeBook entries add, subtract, multiply and divide. Hurry, hurry, I'm late, I'm late, for a very important date.
On the UpSide, the school's system is available through the internet now, instead of only through the campus' intranet, so I can upload grades from home, as long as I meet the deadline, which is convenient.
My car has no heat. Well, that's not technically true, but I can't coax it to divert any into the cabin, where I sit during my morning commute to work. Instead of the levers on my dashboard connected to cables that open and close the flaps directly, Volkswagen engineers, for very good reasons that only they know, built a control box in front of (toward the front of the car) the dashboard. Sliding a lever on the dashboard opens up channels or something in the control box, which taps into the engine's vacuum; the vacuum then travels down other tubes to open a valve in a hose that sends hot water into the heater unit. But the control box is dead, Jim, and no amount of lever-sliding gets my windshield defrosted. If it were connected directly with a cable, I could fix it myself, but I'm not going to take out the vacuum box and try to figure out what's wrong with it. A new unit is $400. A cable could have cost what, a dollar?
I'll tell my mechanic to advise me, and if it's the control box, I'll hie me down to the
