Leaving St Andrews

This has been one crazy week let me tell you. Friday was my last day at school and boy did it go out with a bang. Remember the 10-year-old source of my daily stress from my Sock Puppets post? Well he managed to make it into UK news by having the brilliant idea of bringing a knife into school on Tuesday. Other pupils told teachers that he was carrying a blade around school, and the police came in and charged him with possession of a deadly weapon. You can imagine how shocked I was the next morning driving into work when I heard on a LONDON radio station that one of the day's top stories was that a 10-year-old boy brought a knife into a school in Dundee. Madness! So the boy must be getting expelled, right? Nope he was just suspended for one day and was allowed back in school the last two days with the condition that he wasn't to be around other children... so who got stuck with him?... yep, you guessed it. My last couple of days at work were spent alternating between watching this boy and "babysitting" and entertaining hyper 11-year-olds who were super excited about going into secondary school next year. And yet when Friday came around, I was still sad to leave... go figure. :-)

Friday evening we had a going-away dinner party at Pizza Express with all our friends from church. It was great fun!

Today we drove the mini out to the minimart to get an oil change and replace some wheel arches that I had either lost or damaged with all my crazy driving. :-) We then came back to St Andrews and went to a little goodbye get-together at St Mary's. It was really nice to say goodbye to everyone but of course really sad as well. We then left to go sell the mini to Ruth, our friend from church. It was of course also sad to say goodbye to Mini; however, what followed made me quickly forget my sadness. We got a text from Ruth saying that the mini completely died on her as she was driving it home to Dundee. We got a ride out to her and sure enough the car was completely dead. You could imagine our frustration as we'd only just finished telling her how reliable the car has been these past two years! We then spent the next hour sitting on the side of the road in pouring rain (in June!) waiting for breakdown assistance. For those who might be interested... ie. Rick... we'd tried jumper cables but the car's immobilizer wouldn't turn off because apparently it doesn't work when the car battery gets too low. The breakdown guy finally came and said that he "thinks" it might be the alternator. Well, we somehow managed to disable the immobilzer long enough to get the car started with jumper cables, but it just wasn't charging AT ALL on the drive back to St Andrews. So now the car is sitting outside a machanic's waiting to get checked out next week. Jeff and I feel sooooooooooooo terrible for Ruth. Things would've been soo much better had this happened last week. I mean, what are the chances? The day we sell it? We of course are going to pay for any repairs.

Anyway, needless to say, we are feeling soooooooooooooo drained at the moment and can't wait to RELAX. It'll be nice to get down to London on Monday and chill out. :-)