VEHICLE GET!
Aug. 4th, 2006 12:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shirenomadSince my brother Andrew is shipping out to Okinawa today (apparently they need a few good Marines to stick out their tongues at Kim Jong-il from across the sea), he's loaning me his car for the duration of his deployment. Honda sedan, about 10 years old, good gas mileage. Also, it's got bumper stickers for both the Marine Corps and the Naval Academy, plus a Department of Defense registry sticker, so no one's going to dare steal it. ^_^
Unfortunately, retrieving this vehicle was an interesting exercise. At about 3:45 yesterday, Andrew gets in his car and leaves Twentynine Palms for Orange County; he arrives a little under three hours later. We get food (making the mistake of doing this in a sit-down restaurant), run a couple quick errands, and don't leave Orange County until after 9pm. With no traffic, we return to Twentynine Palms at 11:30, shuffle around a few other items he wants me to stash until he returns, refuel, and I leave Twentynine alone with the car around midnight. I finally stagger into the apartment, crashing from the last caffeine buzz, about 2:30 in the morning.
I took advantage of our somewhat flexible schedules at the office to sleep in an extra hour; I'll make up the same hour by leaving late. And driving myself. After nearly a year of begging rides off of coworkers, it's a very liberating feeling, really...
Unfortunately, retrieving this vehicle was an interesting exercise. At about 3:45 yesterday, Andrew gets in his car and leaves Twentynine Palms for Orange County; he arrives a little under three hours later. We get food (making the mistake of doing this in a sit-down restaurant), run a couple quick errands, and don't leave Orange County until after 9pm. With no traffic, we return to Twentynine Palms at 11:30, shuffle around a few other items he wants me to stash until he returns, refuel, and I leave Twentynine alone with the car around midnight. I finally stagger into the apartment, crashing from the last caffeine buzz, about 2:30 in the morning.
I took advantage of our somewhat flexible schedules at the office to sleep in an extra hour; I'll make up the same hour by leaving late. And driving myself. After nearly a year of begging rides off of coworkers, it's a very liberating feeling, really...
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Date: 2006-08-04 11:18 pm (UTC)The other day in Chinese class we were discussing differences between American and Chinese educational systems, in particular propoganda in history and government classes. The TA wanted to demonstrate what a certain vocabulary item meant using a sentence involving Kim Jong Il, which is pronounced jin zheng ri in Mandarin. Or course we didn't know who he was talking about. Someone guessed, "is that Mao Zedong's wife?" since the previous conversation had been about him. The TA responded with a slight shudder, "that would an extermely scary/freaky situation."