Day 262: Lessen or deal

This morning I received the sad news that my great aunt had died. She was 91. Our thoughts and prayers are with her husband and the rest of her immediate family especially.

Our day was something of a military operation. At 8 am we left home, dropped the girls with friends (thank you so much!), bought a travel-cot. They're called portable play-yards here and it is not until you open the packaging that you first see a mention of the baby sleeping in it. As far as I can tell they are entirely equivalent to the European cots that are sold specifically for sleeping in. I can't begin to imagine why. After that we went to more friends to leave E5N1 with them (thank you thank you!). By this time our contingency build-up meant that we had time for a cup of tea and then onward. Alone. Well, together, but without any children. In the day time. Woo-hoo.

The reason for calling in so many favours? A five-hour pre-licensing driving classroom course. This course is taken by every new driver applying for a license in New York State in between getting a learners permit and taking a driving test. Unlike most people we could drive ourselves there and drive out at lunchtime to get some food. However, although we are permitted to drive on our foreign licences, eventually we have to get a local license, and to do so we have to pretend to be new drivers and go to class with the teenagers. The class was fine. By all accounts much better than T & S's experience. It was largely a waste of time in the sense that we didn't learn all that much, but there were a few relevant bits of information and it was not an unpleasant way to waste five hours. The course included the showing of various videos with grisly stories of car accidents. One of them was a thoroughly traumatic true story of someone killed during an impromptu road race but this was almost completely overshadowed by a Judge from Oregon saying in a you're-finished-in-this-town voice, "If you do this I'm going to send you to the penitentiary for a long time". She was quite a character. Another surreal moment involved the handing out of a whole page of cartoon faces representing various emotions for us to consider how these feelings might affect someone's driving. There were some that the online community probably don't have emoticons for: fiendish, efficient and creative for example ;-)

After the course we picked up E5N1 who had done fine - drinking a bit of milk from a medicine dropper and then falling asleep. Then on the girls who were still having a fantastic time. Phew!