On Saturday, my mom somehow got me out of going to the baby's birthday party. She went instead. I gather she did not have a good time, between (a) having the baby taken away from her for "fussing" when according to her he was not, and (b) not being invited to come over and hang out after the party was over, when everyone else was. What a joy.

Instead, I stayed home and went through papers, followed by going to an improv show and free workshop near to home for a change. However, I ended up doing an interesting curve to try to get into a parking spot, hit the curb at the exact wrong angle, and did some damage to my bumper, loosening whatever flaps there were under the car. I didn't know what the heck to do about this, but went to the workshop (secretly fretting the entire time) and then afterwards, figured I'd drive home and see if it was *that* bad.

It was that bad. It was so noisy driving home that people were literally stopping on the street and pointing at my car and mouthing, "DO YOU KNOW ABOUT THAT?" Yes, yes, I do, but I live five minutes away from here, and I sure as hell can't go to a mechanic now at 7 p.m. on Saturday night, so what do you expect me to do?!

Well, according to my mom, who had gotten back to my house before me, I should have stayed put and called for a tow truck. She yelled at me about this for an hour. So that was a joy. She did duct tape the car up enough so that I wasn't making a horrendous ruckus while driving, so there was that.

I tried to forget about this on my birthday, because well, what's the point of freaking out about that on a day I can't do anything about it anyway? We went to the Scottish Games and it was a good time as always: watched a birds of prey show where the birds of prey had a good time flying where they weren't supposed to, looked at animals, Mom bought me all of my birthday presents in one go (though she did actually custom order me The Testament--the book about the making of The Book of Mormon--as requested, so yay there!), got presented to the queen*, and did some investigating into family history. My clan relations are (distantly, I suppose) Clan Donald on Mom's side and Clan Douglas on Dad's, the latter was something I had not known before. Pretty cool beans.

* People made a lot of cracks about how I look 21 and am lying up about my age. I can't say I blame 'em, if I hadn't seen my various legal papers I wouldn't buy it either.

We also went to the ooh-la-la Buckhorn Steakhouse for dinner--something that surprised me since that seemed like something we'd do for Mom's birthday rather than mine, but since my favorite restaurants in this are out of business I didn't have any specific preference and I knew she's really into the Buckhorn spinoff restaurant at the nearby mall to her. It was good. I'm not a super red meat person, but they do it well and I got free ice cream cake.

As for the car...I didn't sleep all night because I could not stop worrying about what the heck I was going to do about it. Mom called Mo at one point and he was all, "sounds like you'll have to get the entire bumper replaced because duct tape won't hold it forever with all the vibrations," which worried me. I did find a reputable body shop in town online that had NO BAD REVIEWS and that's saying something, and they opened at 7 a.m. So I didn't sleep all night because I couldn't think of anything except how the hell I was going to pay for this. I finally went out to drive the car to the shop and...I could not get the ignition to turn or the car to turn on. (Insert large amount of bad language here.) I had to call AAA for a tow, except then the guy managed to get the steering wheel unlocked on his own and I didn't need it. Whew. So I drove over there and they were all, "eh, this is an easy patch and we can just take out those flaps, you don't really need them anyway," and it took ... maybe 20, 25 minutes to get fixed on the spot. AND THEY DIDN'T EVEN CHARGE ME!!!! I love those guys!!!

So I feel better after all of that, lemme tell ya.

Also, I had a little conversation with my current boss today about the delays I've been told about with regards to my transfer. She immediately talked to some folks, and now the transfer is tentatively "October." I will transfer in at my current job, then get my job responsibilities changed in a few months and hopefully upped enough to get me into a different classification. And hopefully there's a way around the "reapplying" thing. We'll see.

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