last thursday (yes, i probably should have actually written about it last thursday), i went up to geneva’s town court to deal with the traffic ticket i got a month ago for allegedly running a stop sign. i talked to officer lupold (who actually gave me the ticket) before court was in session; he was much more pleasant to talk to when he wasn’t shining his flashlight in my face. i decided to plea to the lesser charge of “failure to obey a traffic device”. that offense is only two points and is a non-moving violation (tho i think running the stop sign is also a non-moving violation, but more points). officer lupold seemed almost apologetic that it could only be reduced to that, since it wasn’t all that much, but i could always have gone to trial (to try to really get the charge dismissed). since that would involve scheduling yet another court date when the district attorney would be there and innumerable more hassles, i just decided to just accept the plea. alas, my record is no longer clean.
i had hoped to get the charge reduced to a “parking violation” like they cleverly do in amherst (so the city gets the money instead of the state) to maintain my clean record, but alas, the town of geneva is much more hardcore (and perhaps more in the spirit of the traffic code). sitting in court wasn’t all that bad as i believe the clerk arranged the cases so that the easy ones were done first. i saw why the officer seemed kinda apologetic with my plea because a lot of people were there for speeding outrageous amounts (20+ mph) and got their charges reduced to the same thing if they had relatively clean records. oh, well. the ticket itself cost me $75 plus $35 court fees.
as for the weekend, it was pretty relaxed. amanda was on call friday, so i did not see her until saturday morning. she spent practically the enter day sleeping (and slept for a lot of sunday as well). karen and carlos had us downstairs for dinner on saturday as well. roy, a second year med student whom amanda and karen studied with at barnes and noble last year was there also.
our latest movies from netflix included caddyshack, which amanda had not seen and i had not seen in quite a while. we watched it on monday, and amanda found it very entertaining. i did not remember the lead caddy guy being that scummy (like he had a girlfriend that he may have gotten pregnant but still slobbered over other women in her presence and slept with them). crazy.
our corolla is acting funny again. it sometimes does not want to start, which seems to be related to the fact that the shifter (automatic) gets locked into park. or slightly out of, as the case may be (its probably gets stuck slightly out of park which is causing the car not to turn over). car troubles always stress me out, especially when neither amanda nor i can deal with them easily, but what can you do; shit happens and you have to deal. which is why reliability is the most important quality of a car imho. anyways, the earliest we can take it into a place is this saturday; hopefully, amanda can get it started the few times she needs to until i get back to buffalo. in retrospect, i should have gotten up that day to take the car in or perhaps dealt with it this weekend (well, dealing with it would have been renting a car (amanda cannot) since most places would not be able to see it immediately and i am not familiar with smaller places in buffalo that might be able to see it earlier). ah, well.