On Tuesdays, we pick up our 11 year old granddaughter at middle school and take her to religious school at Adas Israel. When we got into the car, I set the GPS. Not that I don’t know how to get to the school, but I am beginning to find that, even when you don’t necessarily follow the GPS-selected route, it is helpful because you always know what time GPS expects you to arrive. And I wanted to get to the school when Joan got out, not too much before or too much later.

So I turned on the GPS, and set my destination as Ida B. Wells Middle School, which is only about 15 minutes from our house. We got into our car at about 3:15. The GPS quickly put up on the car’s screen a map with our route, and estimated time of arrival, and a note (which I had never seen before). The note said: “The Ida B. Wells Middle School closes at 3:30 p.m. Are you sure you want to go there now?”

Well, this shows that the GPS is thinking, I guess, but it isn’t thinking very well.

By the way, I also saw a headline on the DC News Now website that I thought could have been worded more carefully. It stated: “Man accused of entering McLean home arrested.” Well, first it made me glad that I don’t live in McLean. Can you imagine being arrested just because you were going home? But then, what I wanted to do is open my window and shout: “Defund the police. Defund the police.” But I didn’t.

Speaking of the police, let’s talk about the fire department. I was sitting on my porch reading this afternoon, when I heard the tell-tale sounds of a fire engine, with a loud siren, which was getting louder and louder. I looked around, saw no smoke and no panic, and assumed the fire truck was not going to stop in front of my house. But it did stop right across the street, and three fire people got out, took their EMT stuff out of the truck, walked up to the door of a house across the street and politely knocked, and knocked, and knocked again. There was no answer, so the three turned around, went back to their fire engine, and headed towards Connecticut Avenue.

I had a number of thoughts. First, what if the reason that no one answered is that there was an ill or injured person inside that couldn’t get to the door. Second, I thought to myself that this must be a false alarm, and who would do such a thing? Third, I realized that maybe that simply had the wrong address and, because of that, the person who called the fire department might die. I certainly wasn’t satisfied with the response.

When I opened the mail today, I saw what looked like an invoice from T-Mobile. I thought this unusual because I have not been a T-Mobile customer for several months, and when I canceled my account, I went over everything with a customer rep on the phone and was told that everything had been accounted for and I owed them nothing more. I was concerned that something had gone wrong in the T-Mobile bureaucracy, and perhaps it had. What was in the envelope was a standard T-Mobile invoice that didn’t tell me that I owed them anything, but told me that they owed me about $110. What they didn’t tell me is what I am expected to do with that information. I looked closely and confirmed that there was no $110 check in the envelope, and their invoice referenced the fact that the account had been closed. Oh, the little annoyances of life.

Speaking of that, while the drive from my house to Ida B. Wells was smooth, getting back on the road after Joan got into the car was complicated because there were many cars stopped at the school waiting for kids (as there always seems to be) even though it is a no parking/no standing area because there is only one lane going north and that lane abuts the curb. And there was one car that really wasn’t parked parallel to the curb, but was sticking out, making it harder for cars to pass. Coming the other way was a bus (the bus Joan usually takes to go home) and for what seemed like a longer time than I am sure it really was, we just sat there, waiting to see who would be in a position to make the first move. it wasn’t me.

On the way from Wells to Adas (a 20 minute drive), things started smoothly and I thought we would just make the 4 p.m. start time, when coming up Tilden Street, we saw one of the ominous “Road Work Ahead” signs, followed by a second sign that said “Road Closed” and a third that pointed to a detour to the right. I followed (slowly) the detour, because that’s what everyone was doing, and turned left on Upton Street, planning to turn left again onto Connecticut. But when I got to Connecticut I saw that there was more road work and a makeshift sign that said “No left turn” in graphics, not in words. I had to turn north on Connecticut and then make a U-turn when I got beyond the barricades in the middle of the street.

I could also see that going north on Connecticut (that is what I would normally do to get home after dropping her off) the traffic was very backed up (I think there was a lane closed a few blocks up the street, so I decided that we should avoid Connecticut and drive up Porter to Reno, and take Reno to Davenport. But guess what! Everyone else decided to do that, too. It was a complicated ride home.

But the weather was beautiful, I got a nice walk in, and I finished the Molly Crabapple book, Here Where We Live is My Country, a book primarily about the Jewish Bund first in Tsarist Russia and then in Poland until it was pretty much wiped out in the Warsaw ghetto. It’s a well written book, containing a surprisingly large amount of diverse material, although it is a bit biased by Crabapple’s progressive political philosophy which leads her to make continuing comparisons between things going on in the 1930s and 1940s to things going on right now in the Middle East and elsewhere.

While having supper, we watched the first of the Maine Senatorial debates, between Susan Collins and Troy Jackson, and I was disappointed by Jackson, the current Maine State Senate President. I haven’t heard what any of the pundits thought of his performance, but if I lived in Maine and was a political independent, I would have a hard time casting a ballot for him.

By the way, I didn’t think I would be able to watch that debate, as none of the 500 (or is it 5000?) channels on the cable feed was carrying it. But on my computer, I found it being streamed by a Portland TV station, and we could watch it, full screen with subtitles, on a computer.

Finally, we watched the fifth (of six) Gifford lectures from the University of Edinburgh, given by emerita Boston University professor Paula Fredrikson, on the the early growth of Christianity and its separation from Judaism. I’d tell you some of the things she said in this lecture (I don’t recall how much I told you about the first four), but it will have to wait. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe after we see the sixth and final lecture.