From cars to turtles

-I can't believe I only just found Gary Shteyngart's essay about his own driving incompetence. It's subscribers'-only for the full version, but think Katha Pollitt minus the gender angle - well, with a different gender angle. "[C]oördination and spatial skills," yes, been there. I'm fine on the road, but parking in a lot all too often requires my getting out of the car, checking where it is in relation to the spot, starting the car again, and lining it up properly. Anyway, Shteyngart now needs to be added to this list of cultural references for new drivers.

-The parental-overshare debate continues. I've written up a long response that I may send somewhere. (Motherlode? Can non-parents submit?) In the mean time, my short response is a) that it's good parent-writers are now at least asking themselves where to draw a line, and b) that there's got to be some middle-ground between "silence" and a national publication or a memoir. There seems to be this misconception that I was suggesting parents with usual or unusual child-issues literally not tell a soul, not seek help, not vent to friends, not keep people in their lives up to date, not complain to ten trillion other parents online or in a publication but anonymously.

-What do you do if two of your dissertation sources - a very small but impossible-to-cut part of the project - are pdfs with a bunch of documents cobbled together, and whoever did the handwritten labeling had impossible-to-decipher handwriting? Go to the original sources, right? (I know which author, can tell which newspapers, which year, in one case the date, but need page numbers for both.) Which I now see are nowhere to be found. Ostensibly online, but the site where they're supposed to be isn't getting me to them. Googling around in the usual ways (article title, for instance), and, nothing. Usual-suspect library catalogues (Princeton, NYPL) aren't fixing this. These being French newspapers, I should have found them when I was in Frahnce, but I'm not sure I even knew about these articles then. I'm thinking the answer is to just show the pdfs in question to a librarian.

-Running in the woods sounds relaxing, and it is sort of idyllic - all the birds (bluejays! cardinals!), a soothing "Fresh Air" podcast - if a bit less so what with the gallon of DEET I must coat myself with before entering the tick zone. But then there will be something so nature-y that I can hardly handle it. Today's discovery:

Yes, a turtle. A creature I half thought was prehistoric and akin to a dinosaur, half assumed lived somewhere in the world (the Galapagos?), but not a ten-minute drive from Wegmans. A very pretty one, but with bugs buzzing around it. Which at first I thought meant that it was dead, but it seemed just fine - I guess some kind of symbiotic relationship.