Slice of Life (1996)

[Passage from my journal, 11 October 1996 (4:55 pm PDT)]

I

 rose early and screwed around some with the old word-mangler here. Read the paper when it came—a boy who dreamed of being a herpe­tologist had been strangled by his pet python—and talked with my brother when he came [through to leave his dog off]. I was letting Glide [the dog] out to play in the back­yard after my brother left when the phone rang. This turned out to be someone from Unger and Associates (or something like that) to harass me about my student loan. Infinitely depressed, I headed out for the bus.

There was an older couple from Las Vegas on the bus who were heading for Pioneer Square and seemed so impressed by our public transportation system. There’s nothing like it in Vegas, they said, where the busses only run on the strip to get people from one casino to the next or whatever—and now they have people-movers running above the streets to accomplish the same thing.

I hit the library, which was interesting in a way. I found some information on William M. Turn­er in the 1880 Soundex, and learned a little about this new auto­mated renewal service and about this business of running out of renewals on books.  And then after that I headed out to Powell’s where I struck out completely on everything, though I did buy a book of parodies, as well as seeing a book on Rocky and Bullwin­kle.

I got home to find that GH had dropped by, bring­ing the final settlement from the estate. He had broken his collarbone while in England, at the same time he totaled his rented car. GH had come and gone, but he had stayed long enough to say that that tree growing by the driveway is a dangerous menace and should be removed (it is a fast-growing pest that does damage to foundations and so on). I went out and cut down that damn tree, wor­ried a bit about the student loan, and then came up here to write in my journal.