Good bye Molly Ivins

Molly Ivins, 1944-2007

The world will be a much poorer place without her sharp wit and insight. I don't want to contemplate living through the rest of the Bush administration without her.

Partially kosher

We got our driver's licenses today without incident. We simply walked into the nearest driver's license station, plopped our thick dossiers of official documents on the counter, proved we weren't blind and smiled for the camera. And oh yes, wrote two $26 checks because although we were being helped at the same time, it was two separate transactions. Ah, bureaucracy.

We also found out that we don't have to go to Harrisburg to register the car, we just have to go to one of the many private businesses in Philadelphia that performs this service and pay their fees instead. As it turns out, the Harrisburg office is just the only government office that performs this service as the whole system was privatized.

I may be struck dead for saying this, but I miss the Indiana Bureau of Motor Vehicles. Sure, it was a soul-sucking room of despair and horror, populated by employees who had been stripped of all will to live and the restless souls of people who had been trapped waiting in cracked plastic chairs for all eternity. But at least you could go in and take care of all of this in the same place at the same time. And then pay with a credit card. If you went in at the right time of day, it could even be downright speedy.

***

Tomorrow is the first day of February, which is the day I told myself I would enact my New Year's Resolutions since January lacked any semblance of structure or consistency. So starting tomorrow I will:

1. Start keeping track of my diet and exercise again. I was doing this pretty successfully for parts of last fall, but pretty much stopped when we started so much travelling. So time to blow the dust off of my Sparkpeople account and try that exercise video I got recently.

2. Get out of the house and meet people We're already doing some of that, although we need to get on actually using some of the phone numbers we were given soon. Hopefully settling down in a church or meeting will help. And I need to figure out how to find a playgroup, which I don't have the first clue how to go about doing. The closest library with a toddler storytime is clear across town, which pretty much destroys my big plan for that. It's been too cold to go to the playground and we don't have enough money to for things like Gymboree. And frankly, even if I possessed 1/10 of the social skills I would need to ingratiate myself to complete strangers, I'm not sure I want to wind up in a playgroup with people who I have nothing in common with and will look at me like I have two heads because I use cloth diapers. Or look pityingly at me because of our breastfeeding troubles and condescendingly explain to me how I could have avoided a c-section. I had actually found myself wondering if you could go to La Leche League meetings if you don't breastfeed any more before I thought of that. What I really need is for the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society to have a subsection of Parents of Small Children Who Generally Keep An Open Mind About These Things Because None of Us Are Parenting Deities You Know. Failing that, if anyone has any great ideas for how to find a playgroup where you don't stick out like a sore thumb, I'd love to hear them.

Meanwhile, I'm considering joining the Y, because at least K will be able to play with other kids at the free daycare they have.

3. Read more and keep track of it It's not that I don't read, but the past couple years have been pretty lightweight in that department, so I'd like to try reading less on the computer and more in print. And keep track of it just to see how I've been doing.

4. Get to bed at a decent hour every night I've been pretty good about that since we got here, so all I really have to do is keep my momentum up. And with that in mind, I should go to bed.