Sylvia's Journal

I drove home from work last night heading into a big rainstorm that had as its portal an enormous and sharply contoured rainbow. Outside the arc of the primary rainbow was a secondary, equally large but its colors washed out. I took the picture during a slow ride over the Tobin Bridge.

The sky was threatening and colorful with yellows, grays, blues and purples alternating in between hurrying clouds. It was a far cry from yesterday’s blue and windless skies; not a day for flying.

It was also a full workday with meetings and other events back to back, leaving little time to organize myself, let alone get anything done. What I did get done was getting my trip to Kabul organized. I will depart on Election Day and will be relying on the Northwest pilot to tell me, and everyone else on the plane, who our next president is going to be. I know they announce the outcomes of big sporting events, and assume that elections play in that league as well. I would have liked to be in the US all day and had some fantasy of driving people to the polls in New Hampshire and then, hopefully, celebrate at night. Instead I get to see the reactions in Amsterdam.

I arrived home only minutes after Tessa and Steve who left Boston later but don’t have to deal with the Tobin bridge or the roads that lead to it and so they go much faster. Everyone but Axel was hungry. He had been too engrossed in choosing the right color palette for his next school project that he forgot all about dinner. I skimmed parts of Steve’s chips and salsa and Tessa’s noodles and finished some leftovers that did not need to be cooked and then finished everything off with stale leftovers of Steve’s birthday cake. I chastised myself for hours afterwards to have shown so little self restraint; mostly because the stale cake left a terrible taste in my mouth. I should know better.

I have been surrounded during the last week by sick people and suspect it is finally my turn. I had planned to take a hot bath, a hot toddy and crawl into bed at about 7 PM but Axel needed a ride to get the car back from the repair garage in Essex. It is the new (210000 mile) Subaru (as opposed to the old- 240000 mile Subaru) that is sick; or rather its gas tank is defective which we knew because of the gas fumes. The repairs will cost just about the low estimate of its blue book value and we agonized what to do. In the end we decided not to do anything right now until we know what other expenses are lining up for the end of the year: new fireplace, the new chimney, end-of-year contributions and possibly Tessa’s college tuition, if nothing else. Even an old second hand car is just not in the stars right now.

We arrived at the repair shop and found the car with its flashers on. Somehow the alarm got triggered by the mechanics and after much trial and error the fuse was finally taken out to stop the flashing. We did not even know the car had an alarm and were happy to stop the false one. Unfortunately the cost estimate showed that the gas fumes were not a false alarm, though not an emergency either. We were advised to not fill up the gas tank for now. This is problematic because the gas gauge does not work and filling it up after 200 or so miles is the way by which we calculate how much is left.