My car is finally completely legal again: after losing my registration renewal, renewing it at the DMV the day it expired, and holding on to the sticker for a few weeks, I put the sticker on. The broken brakelight (which I had thought was an electrical problem, since I replaced the bulb and it wasn't fixed, turned out to be...a broken bulb) and backup lights are fixed. And though the State of California doesn't care, the car should no longer suddenly decide to idle at 1500-2000 rpm at random times.

I'm torn about whether I should take Ceramics or French from the adult school. In theory I could take both, but that would make me just a bit busier than I want to be scheduled for. I'm leaning toward French, since I'll be taking several jewelry classes which may scratch the arts-and-crafts itch for a while. The Palo Alto school offers Ceramics pretty regularly, and I've been meaning to do French longer than ceramics.

(Why? When I went to Europe, speaking pretty fluent Spanish, I discovered that in fact no one in Europe speaks Spanish outside of Spain. Any given person who didn't speak English almost invariably spoke either German or French in addition to native languages (German was a popular second language in the Czech Republic, for example). Why am I not learning German? Well, I want to explore France, and German is hard. I tried taking French in high school, but being so familiar with Spanish, I got bored. I may still get bored, but it's only 9 classes instead of a whole year.)

Back to aikido tonight. We had a lovely New Year's Eve training as always, but as I walked around today--I took an unfortunate walking route home from the mechanic which also involved ripping my jacket while hopping a fence to reach a pedestrian overpass--I thought, "Huh, my body feels like I haven't been training much. I wonder why?", and I should really train more. It's good for me. On top of that, I actually looked at my training days, and if I stay disciplined and really start working on it now, I could probably test for 1st kyu in September.