broke vegas

so i was driving to my night class this evening on my motorcycle. i was about two blocks from my house and had just made a right turn onto a rather major street. my bike starts wigging out a little. it's sputtering. it's coughing. it's wheezing. it made some strange, loud noise.

i'm frantically trying to figure out what's going on.

at this point, as i'm almost stopped or stalled, i notice that my clutch grip is just loose. as in, i squeezed it to disengage the transmission when i stopped at the corner, and for some reason it hasn't stopped squeezing. even though i have.

fortunately, there's a side street right there i can coast/sputter onto. from there i see that the cable normally attached to this handle, is no longer there. where has it gone? i have no idea. i guess it went down the cover sleeve.

none the less, i can't really shift gears. i mean, i sort of can, but it's not really driveable. or i'm not cool enough to drive it this way. so, i got it into neutral and push it home.

by the time i get there, i'm a beet red, sweaty mess. and i still need to drive to class. even with the air in the car cranked, i don't think i wasn't sweaty and red for the first twenty minutes of class.

and now i've got to get my bike fixed. drat.

fun times

doing my monday night t.a. gig right now. the first hour of class, the teleconference stuff wasn't working. pretty much the only reason they have ta's @ the different centers is in the event that there is a problem such as this. the thing is, no one is really trained on how to trouble shoot the system. so, we kept trying to call the other classrooms to no avail. then, we gave up for like a half hour (after a half hour of trying). on a whim, we called again, and it worked. smooth.

so, i'm also grading papers during this time (for a completely unrelated deal). there should have been 26 papers submitted. 15 actually turned in. 5 of which contain elements of plagiarism. good times. i'm not sure if people don't know how to write papers or what. well, i do know that most understand how to write and could at least attempt to give credit. heck, at least improperly give credit. but, there is so much cut & paste going on. heck, i even found someone using a pdf file that i could find on the 'net.

for all writers out there: if you can find your info with a google search, so can i. really, that's all i do. google sentences. and when it pops up, and you haven't quoted or cited it, you're in trouble.