Been a long day...

Well, tonight's fellowship meeting went by fine. A lot of kids were absent, on account that probably most of the families were out enjoying their Saturday night by celebrating Chinese New Year. We still had about 20 kids, though... the thing I found funny was for once, there were actually slightly more girls than there were guys. Most of the time, it's about 75% of the kids who are guys at BASIC right now.

My lesson went fine... I think I sounded pretty nervous my first 5 or so minutes talking, but after that, it was a little bit easier. The lesson was shorter than I expected, but then again, I should have remembered that I have a tendency to speak a lot faster than normal when I'm up in front of a group. But I guess I'd prefer my message to be too short than too long... the kids are in high school, but they're still kids... and kids have short attention spans, haha. I wouldn't want the poor kids to have sit through 30 or 45 minutes of my chatter.

Future note for Powerpoint presentations: make to use a common font... the font I picked wasn't on the laptop I borrowed to do my presentation, so I had to do some last minute fixes to my slides.

Post-BASIC, I drove one of the kids home and a little driving adventure. He lives on Queen Anne hill, so I had to take the Mercer Street exit, through the Seattle Center area. Getting off the exit, a hatchback from the lane to my right suddenly swerved over and cut me off. I braked hard and narrowly avoided rear ending the stupid bastard... my car was at a dead stop for probably no more than 5 seconds, when I heard screeching brakes and then a *THUMP* - yep, I got rear ended. Great, I thought... my first time driving this poor kid home and his high school fellowship counselor gets in an accident.

I turned off the engine and slowly got out of the car to inspect the damage. At the same time, the driver of the SUV that rear-ended me got out too - young girl (probably high school or college age) who looked pretty scared. I asked her if she was OK and she said she was. The damage actually was extremely light - just a dent in my rear bumper, some scraping of paint. I'm sure the girl was nervous, because under Washington state traffic law, the driver in the following car of a rear-end collision is almost always held liable for all damage. Since the damage to my car was pretty light (and it's a ghetto beater ride anyways), I told the girl we were cool and we didn't have to report the accident to her insurance. She looked relieved; I was thankful that the accident wasn't worst, praise God.

Meanwhile, the idiot who had cut across my lane (another teenbopper girl, I got a good look) was still in front of me, trying to merge over to the left. She's lucky I'm not a different person, or I would had some choice words for her lack of driving skills while taking a crowbar to her rear-windshield. Grrr.

The rest of the ride was without incident. Again, I'm grateful to God that nothing happened, especially to my passenger. I always feel more conscious when other people are with me in the car, especially kids.

Hopefully tomorrow is incident-free.

***



I think kids like me who remember what happened to the Challenger, are moved by the recent Columbia tragedy. For myself, there's a strong sympathy for the astronauts and their families, maybe because I vividly remember that what I wanted as a kid to grow to be was an astronaut. That dream was profoundedly affected by what happened to the Challenger shuttle; I guess you could say it was my first serious childhood confrontation with the idea of dying and the reality of being dead...
posted by G at 3:51 AM   |

in?scrip?tion (n-skrip-shun)n.
1. The act or an instance of inscribing.
2. Something, such as the wording on a coin, medal, monument, or seal, that is inscribed.
3. A short, signed message in a book or on a photograph given as a gift.
4. The usually informal dedication of an artistic work.
5. Jeremiah 31:33