Back again.

This is sort of like sending email to myself. Anyway, I wanted to recount my scary story from the other night. This was Wednesday at 10pm, and I was leaving the French class that I'm taking, walking down the street with a classmate, and chatting. She said, "I saw your ring, are you married?" So I was telling the how-we-met story, and we saw a police car zoom by us going the other direction. My new friend said, that was weird. We turned around, about to get back to our conversation, when we approached the hotel down the street and a cop yelled, "KIDS, get away from here!" And then, "Someone secure the area!" We both did suddenly feel like children, and scattered down the street, crossing a large intersection to safety, where we turned around to see several cops in bulletproof vests, guns drawn, creeping around a wall to the entrance of the hotel. Whoa! My friend and I looked at each other and I said we could have gotten shot! There were lots of other official-looking people with earpieces, and big black SUVs that obviously didn't belong to Joe Schmo, and my friend asked one of the men, "What happened?" They brushed us off. We continued walking, quickly, toward home. I looked in the Post the next day, but didn't see any crime news about it. We weren't in a bad area at all, in fact, it's a very posh area of DC. So there must have been some white-collar crime going on, or a drug bust or something. I felt guilty that I did something as irresponsible as enter a potential firing zone, but there was no way for us to have known what was happening.

On another, somewhat related note, my French class is fun! It seems, and my new friend affirmed via email, that I am a bit ahead of most of the other students. Maybe if I take another class, I'll be bumped to a more advanced level. I was a bit shocked that the prof. placed me in mid-intermediate. But I do need the grammar review! We did passive voice in the last class. I shouldn't be ashamed, seeing as my work let me go to an intensive grammar review in English! And I am getting what I want- to retrain my ear for French, and get my pronunciation back to snuff. The funny thing is that I had to get these cassette tapes for at-home practice. Tapes?! Who plays tapes? My LH (loving husband) went scrounging for a Walkman for me today at Best Buy, and they carried ONE type, and had ONE of that type left in the store. And it was something like $35. You can get a Discman for $20 now! My first portable CD player was a big deal, and pretty expensive if I remember. Something like $75, which was worth more in the early '90s.

So, I will be going on vacation all of next week, with my iPod and my Walkman. Having the Walkman in Michigan will really make me nostalgic. I remember the one year I dropped my Walkman in the lake, with my favorite Beatles tape playing, and my dad very carefully strung the whole tape out across the great room to dry. I'll get in the old van (retired to MI), sit in my old chair that took me for many years to and from MI, and feel like I'm a kid! Except I'll be there with LH!

This is a very long post. I wonder if I should break them up if I'm going to ramble like this. Then again, this is how I am used to writing in my journal, so whatever!