Happy Waterloo Day

and a mere 193 years since Drouet screwed the pooch, and let the Bad Guys win.

To celebrate, or not, I'm off to Albuquerque again today - just for a meeting tomorrow, then home tomorrow night in time for our weekend guest arriving Friday.

Last weekend was a nice change - the first weekend we haven't had to spend, frenziedly comparison-shopping and dashing around trying to fit out the house and make it livable. Instead we could spend it at a more leisurely, even lazy, pace, just adjusting ourselves slowly to life here. Haven't really tried to explore the city for adventures and places of interest yet, but that will happen soon enough. We also had to spend a certain amount of time dealing with the car rental company and exchanging our rental -

We had picked up a GPS system so Cat could steer around without constant resort to the map book - possibly we should have done this much earlier! Or possibly not, as Cat had an accident on Thursday last week, where she seems* to have been distracted by the GPS unit and failed to notice that she was at a red light (she apparently missed the existence of the lights, not just whether it was red or green). As a result, she had a - fortunately minor - prang with a car crossing in front of her: just her front corner and the other party's rear bumper, but a nasty shock (to both drivers, I'm sure).

The actual damage seems to have been trivial on both parts, but it left her very shaken and unsure for the next three days, unsurprisingly: so we spent quite a bit of the weekend with her driving, and taking things slow & careful, to rebuild her confidence.

I'm feeling quite ready to try driving myself now, but we still can't afford it - the rental company insurance is already preposterously exorbitant, and jumps another huge step if more than one person is listed as driving, so this'll have to wait until we have our own car.

Which looks like it's going to be the project for this weekend - not least because the cost of renting is killing our budget severely: due to the difficulties of getting financing arranged, it's already dragged on twice as long as I had projected originally. Of course, if my employer would just pull finger and pay me the promised relocation expenses, then this would be a lot simpler (not that they are refusing to, just that it takes place at the speed of continental drift). Oh well, more on that later, I guess.



* I wasn't present, so can't say for myself