Continuing our household's eternal voyage into the bowels of machinery hell, Tom's pickup did not pass inspection yesterday and the dishwasher broke. T has some hopes that he's been able to glue together the thingummy bits of plastic controlling the dishwasher's start button so that it will function again, but given our season of household disasters, I expect we'll have to call a guy who won't be able to come for six weeks and when he does will charge us many hundreds of dollars to insert a small piece of new plastic into the slot. The truck I don't even need to guess about. Vehicles are always the worst-case scenario. 

Well, anyway, I did ship out one of my editing projects yesterday, so that's something. And I'm getting a haircut today. And it's Friday. And we're not out of coffee. And Chuck didn't bust up any more glassware in the night.

This morning I have to turn my attention to performance materials and then to a zoom meeting with Monson faculty. It will be a refreshing change from editing. And I was glad to get out last night to write, though the image of T taking apart the dishwasher as I left was sorrowful. First he came home from work to bad truck news. And then he had to deal with the dishwasher. Plus he had to wash all of the dirty dishes that were in said dishwasher. It was not a restful evening for him.

But I did have an excellent interaction at the meat market yesterday. I stopped in to buy a loaf of bread and decided to pick up a couple of pork chops as well. "17.83," said the butcher, ringing them up for me. And then: "Hey, that was an important year! Was that when the Constitution was signed?" I responded that I wasn't sure exactly what year it was, and then another butcher chimed in, "I think it was 1784 or 1785." And then I said, "I guess we can be sure that they were all thinking about the Constitution anyway." And the second butcher agreed and remarked, "I used to think the Revolution ended when they signed the Declaration of Independence." The first butcher added, "But really they were still at war for a while longer." And then I said, "And don't forget that practically as soon as they were done with the Revolution, they got started with the War of 1812." The three of us nodded thoughtfully and then I waved goodbye and walked my purchases back home.