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Tuesday, January 25, 2005

The Radio Knows

After a long day at work yesterday, I had a meeting with the officers of the Knitting Guild of which I am Vice-President for planning out our year, and drove carefully home in the dark. The roads were slick, and there was some black ice, so it was with extra care that I made my way home, thinking of poor Oscar, warm in his room, but probably with yellow eyeballs and crossed legs.

Less than a block from home, a police officer pulled me over. When I asked if there was a problem, he said my tags came up expired. Now, some of you may recall the nightmare I went through when I moved back to Maryland. I was NOT pleased to hear that the tags might not be good. I pulled out all the information I had, and showed him. Registration: expires April 30, 2005. According to the Zelda calendar I have in my office, it is not yet April 30, 2005. Doesn't that mean I'm okay?

You would think so, wouldn't you? You would be wrong.

The officer seemed very friendly, and though a very big part of me wanted to indignantly demand that he tell me what inspired him to run my tags through the computer to begin with, since I wasn't speeding or driving recklessly, somewhere, deep inside, I had a moment of lucidity, and I simply remained charming and friendly. It must have been a stomach bug or something, but I am grateful to it, as the fine for driving on expired tags is $275, and I didn't exactly have that in my ash tray. He said "well, I probably won't give you a ticket, just a warning, since you seem like a nice person" and I exclaimed "my mom thinks so and she's really smart!" and he laughed. When he came back with the warning, he let me know that the DMV was claiming they'd sent me a notice that I hadn't had little Norman's emissions tested and my tags had been suspended for over a month. He also said "I don't mean to scare you but" (is there ANYWAY that phrase in itself won't be scary???) if I got pulled over again, the cop would be full within his/her right to give me that $275 ticket. Oy.

By then it was really late, so I got the dog out and drained, I cuddled with the cats, and I tried to sleep. I called my dad this morning, who will henceforth be known as the coolest dad EVER. I thought he wasn't using his car, and asked if I could borrow it, since I had a knitting class this morning and couldn't go down to the DMV to argue. He agreed, dug into his own car to find its emissions slip and found a toll free number to see what we could do. It's one of those things where we can't go to get the emissions test done without the slip from the DMV, but as friendly and cheerful as the employees of the DMV tend to be (oh, watch that you don't step in that puddle of sarcasm, it seems to be dripping around here...) chances are they would give us a hard time if we tried to go in there without the passed emissions test. I had to leave to teach my class, and drove in his car thoroughly irked. I was maybe 20 minutes down the road and my father called my cell phone. He had called that toll-free number, spoke to someone who said "oh, that happens a lot" (HELLO???? Do we think maybe the system is BROKEN???) "we'll just extend her due date to May and send her another notice in March, she can drive the car freely now!" type type type, Thank you very much, and the whole matter is settled. See? Coolest dad EVER.

So I'll return his car to him after work tonight, and I'm feeling much better about driving poor little Norman (gosh, imagine if I'd gotten into an accident with supposedly expired tags!). But the thing is -- RIGHT after I hung up the phone from hearing the good news about Norman's legal reprise, the song "I Fought the Law and the Law Won" came on...

In other news, my slow knitting student figured out not only how to do the knit stitch, but how to fix it when she twists her stitches. I kept her just knitting today, and we'll start purl next time she comes in. I don't want to teach her that purl is harder, since she's got enough of a mental block about the whole thing, but I sure don't want her to get at all confused, so I told her I wanted her to feel very secure, and she agreed. My speedy gal will be starting a sweater for her father when she comes next. We did a few swatches today - she was getting about 5 st/inch using st-st, but wants to do a cabled sweater, so I had her do a cabled swatch, and we talked about what could have happened if she'd assumed she was still knitting 5 st/inch when the cabled swatch came in as 8 st/inch! It was a good little lesson in gauge, and I'm looking forward to her starting on the sweater.

And in TSC news, I did another two rows last night in trying to calm down after the tag incident, and when I checked, I've got something like 40 stitches more than I'm supposed to. I can't imagine how that happened - I can see a few stitches off, but 40 is immense. I'll double count tonight when I'm a little more coherant, and if I have to rip back to row ten, I'll cry while I do it.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Hours Spent Knitting: 11
Rows Completed (of 222): 21
Estimated Time of Completion: 116.28 hours

3 Comments:

Blogger Amy Boogie said...

Love the emissions tests. My poor old beat up truck never passed them even after I had a bunch of stuff changed. So we had to find a *cough* creative mechanic. Luckily I live in Maine now where we don't have those ever so inefficient tests. :) Your dad is awesome!

8:07 AM  
Blogger ME... said...

For future reference....if nice and calm isn't working, weeping meekly has worked to get me a "warning" in the past! My motto is when in doubt, start crying (and if you have three kids in the car, get them to give the cop a scared look like "I can't believe you just made my mom cry!"... ) Thank you for letting me join your spinning ring!

9:01 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Great news about the warning instead of a ticket. Sounds like you handled things well. I would have been tempted to ask why he wasn't pulling over people who were doing unsafe things instead of me (I, of course, am an angel and never do aaanything wrooong...). Glad it was all straightened out by your dad. Don't do what I did, though, and forget about the extended date - late fees are the pits!

11:58 AM  

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