Friday's Good Karma

Today was my day for finally mustering the mental fortitude to deal with renewing my driver's licence at the NJ Motor Vehicle Commission. This was the third time there for obtaining or renewing my license (last time in 2004, with Thea in tow, home all of a week or so from China), as well as several miscellaneous trips to obtain duplicate registrations or purchasing the Conquer Cancer vanity plates. All previous trips have made me wonder how the former Soviet Union could have created mindless, soul-less bureaucracy as an export product.

After driving Thea to school, caught behind every idiot with a driver's license who had forgotten how to use a turn signal to show intent as well as a total inability to allow enough room for others to go around while he or she holds up traffic with the unannounced left turn, Micah and I had our session with the speech therapist this morning; her whole idea of introducing Micah to scissors was a big fat non-event. He got to make two snips in a strip of meatballs and then glue them onto a paper picture of spaghetti - even with the coveted scissors he was bored in about three meatballs. And now I have to spend 15 minutes morning and evening hyper-correcting him for pronunciation, I think I'll leave that to Steve.

Micah's turning into quite a mynah bird, repeating everything he hears. Unfortunate when it's "stupid idiot" called out to the car in front of us.

So after speech and after applying a light coating of spackle to my face, Micah and I set out for the NJMVC. We got there at 11:45 am, and in addition to getting the driver's license we also went for a duplicate registration (different lines, no one-stop shopping, so it's not quite all sunshine and puppies) and were back in the car by 12:05 pm. And in the whole process, only encountered one snotty humanoid employee (the receptionist). Micah just loved standing on the yellow taped lines - he lined himself up next to me while I was having my picture taken and then lining up next to the guy in front of us at the registration section. (Get this, the chick flashed my current-about-to-expire license photo on the screen and said do you want this or a new one? I almost kept the four-years-younger me, but decided to go for the real deal)

Now I'm just sitting around waiting for the meteor to land on my head because that kind of stuff doesn't happen to me, so there will be a karmic trade-off somewhere down the line.

Meanwhile, back to life with an almost five-year old, Thea blew up her first balloon last night. She's been trying and trying, but just not getting the coordination of breathing, pinching the balloon shut while inhaling, and the power to force the air in. Then, it just happened. It was rather cool - and a redemonstration was captured on film to put installed on the blog at a later date.