On the road again

What a weekend! I took my first long car trip on my own, driving two hours to spend the weekend with a friend for his birthday. The drive up was uneventful and pleasant, though I discovered shortly after I arrived that my front right tire had gone flat. Had that happened while I was flying along at 80 mph (not often, but occasionally), who is to say just what might have happened. Needless to say, it was quite scary when the realization hit me of what danger I had put myself in. Luckily, my hero came out to change the tire the next morning (on his birthday), and the rest of the weekend passed smoothly enough. It was a weekend of watching movies, feeding the ducks/geese at a local lake, meeting his friends, going to church, grilling out, and staying up far later than we should have. I'd do it over again in a heartbeat, flat tire and all.

Is someone selling car insurance?

So as I was heading upstairs today to discover whether or not (not yet) the computer people had succeeded in cleaning out the office that they had taken over from preservation, I saw a tiny creature wiggle across the floor. Now, wiggle may sound like an odd adjective to use here, but it really was a squirmy little thing. I called my graduate library assistant up to see, and she ran off after a moment to return with a coffee mug and a piece of mylar. It took a little coaxing, but we eventually trapped the little lizard in the cup and took him outside to release him into an environment that would be more likely to have a food source for him. I would have preferred to leave him in the building, but I don't think it could have survived, and any insects I've seen in the building have been considerably larger than this gecko. Oh, well ... I've been told we commonly get much larger ones in the building during the summers, and those ones like to jump out of boxes at people! Happiness.