Good News: Part 3 (updated!)

But these frantic weekend trips home were a cakewalk compared to what was coming. Exactly two months into my semester, on the way back to Michigan after seeing a losing Twins playoff game, my car made a thudding sound in Ashland, Wisconsin. The inside of it started to stink like some sort of substance that should probably have stayed in the engine. I pulled over and called Frank, who told me to keep driving as far as it would go. Ashland was the exact halfway point on the trip.

I drove and I drove, smelling that smell, noticing that the brakes seemed to be depressing a little too far when I'd slow down. But they were still *kinda* working. As I drove, I would get to feeling like everything was normal, but then I'd get a whiff of that motor smell and remember my situation, and a low level panic would set in.

I drove and I drove, not stopping to do anything, because I didn't know if the car would start again. I was surviving on rations, my friends...the trail mix was running low. Once I crossed the border back into Michigan, I could no longer ignore the fact that I had to pee. It was dusk by this point.

I pulled into the rest area and decided that I'd leave the car running. I slowed down as I came upon a dip in the road leading to the rest stop. At this point, the car made a thunking noise and seemed to sink about a foot to the ground. I got out and checked out the back of the car. Everything looked okay until I walked around to the rear passenger wheel. A thick black liquid was oozing from the wheel well onto the tire and pooling on the ground.

I flipped open my phone - who could I call? Was the car safe to drive? No reception. I was alone in the freaking wilderness at dusk with a bleeding car and no way to contact anyone. I ran into the bathroom, peed at record speed, and got back inside my little dying car. It still drove for me. It made a couple more thuds on the way out to the highway, and after that, it drove somewhat normally. The brakes were even softer now, but we just kept on going.

And then...Marquette. I quickly realized that I had to give myself about twice the normal braking distance: at the first stoplight in town, next to WalMart, I got dangerously close to the back of a semi truck, but stopped rolling just in time. Many thoughts of, "is this safe?" "am I going to kill myself or someone else?" but the car made it all the way to Joe's Garage, where my roommate picked me up.

The next afternoon, I came back to clean it out and sign the title over to a junkyard.

Good News: Part 2

They didn't clean the apartment by the time he moved in at the end of August, by the way. And there was also a stack of paint cans in the pantry courtesy of the maintenance man. The first time I came to visit in September, I was driven crazy by the slow-draining bathroom drain (which the maintenance man had yet to fix), and I started digging in there with a coat hanger to see if I could dislodge anything. Well, I came up with a seashell. And then another one. And then another one. The pipe was lousy with them. I also got a toothpaste cap.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg, my friends.

But enough for now about Frank's apartment. Let's talk about me. I was in Michigan. I was teaching a composition class at noon, and then going to an evening class at six. When I wasn't teaching or taking classes, I was freaking the fuck out about planning lessons and completing homework. It was really hot, so I was doing a lot of sweating. My hair was at an awkward length, so it was doing a lot of frizzing. I was calling Frank a lot, planning trips home every couple of weeks.

Before those weekend trips home, I would try to work ahead on my homework and class planning, because the round trip to Minnesota took up fourteen hours of valuable working time, in addition to the time I spent hanging out with Frank and my friends from home. I could never fully enjoy myself when I was there because I would feel guilty whenever I was doing something besides work for more than a couple of hours. So, before each successive weekend trip, I would try to work ahead even further, but I never seemed to get as much done as I wanted to.

Good news, everyone: My husband is annoying me again! Part 1

So, it's been a while since I posted. A year and a half, perhaps? I did wind up moving to Michigan, but I should specify that it's the U.P., which is more like a shriveled appendage of Wisconsin than a part of Michigan. No offense! It's a super-bumblefuck area (no offense!), which meant that Frank wasn't able to move here until March, and even then, it was really lucky, because he got one of the six jobs available in the town.

The point I'm trying to make here is that we lived apart for a lot of months. Seven. And we got to missing each other. A lot.

He helped me move here last August, the weekend before my teacher training began. When he left that Monday, it involved many tears on my part, but he reminded me that I'd be coming back home in four days. (The upcoming weekend was our anniversary, and we had Twins tickets.) So, after that first week of training, within minutes of being dismissed, I drove my little white Volvo the seven hours to Minnesota. I pulled into Saint Paul late that night, and fell asleep in my old bed in my old apartment with my old man and things still seemed relatively okay.

The Twins won the game and the weekend was normalish, except for me agonizing over making a syllabus for a large percentage of it, and us spending my last morning in town looking at a somewhat crummy (but more affordable) apartment closer to Frank's job in the suburbs. He started the proceedings to sign a yearlong lease, which should have terrified me, since I had just moved to Michigan to start a 3-year school program, but I was in such a daze about everything that it all seemed reasonable. He'd looked for jobs in Michigan, and there was nothing. What else could we do? And surely they'd at least clean the apartment before he moved in. Everything would be fine!