{"id":15383,"date":"2012-10-02T07:45:00","date_gmt":"2012-10-02T11:45:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/hameblog\/2012\/10\/02\/advice-sought-re-driving-lessons\/"},"modified":"2025-09-12T07:50:14","modified_gmt":"2025-09-12T10:50:14","slug":"advice-sought-re-driving-lessons","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/2012\/10\/02\/advice-sought-re-driving-lessons\/","title":{"rendered":"Advice sought, re: driving lessons"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> Hello, friend.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m here at the pub, ploughing through my e-mail, fiercely trying to get to &#8220;inbox zero,&#8221; and there&#8217;s one to-do I&#8217;m stumped by: when should I start my driving lessons?<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p>After months of putting it off and genuinely not knowing how to choose, I finally picked a driving instructor. We&#8217;d exchanged a few e-mails, so I found out how this works and how much it costs (cue sharp intake of breath at the cost). I&#8217;d promised myself, Craig, and the lady who runs the local bulk food shop (we chat when I&#8217;m in) that I&#8217;d commit to lessons by September&#8221;&#8221;so by contacting the instructor I just squeaked in on that deadline, technically.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p>Yesterday I was sitting in the living room, typing away, when I saw the instructor sitting in his car outside my window. After a moment of confusion (had he arrived to pick me up? what?), I saw that he&#8217;d just stopped there to send a text message&#8221;&#8221;like a good driver&#8221;&#8221;so I took the opportunity to go out and tap on his window. Then it was his turn to be surprised, but I told him who I was and we chatted about my options. His only concern was that I have my provisional licence. (Oh yes, I&#8217;ve had that for a year.)<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p>He was really friendly, and that was the little bit of reassurance I needed. Thank you for that, Universe.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p>Now my conundrum: I&#8217;m really busy this month, going away to Germany for a week, then going to Edinburgh at the end of the month for the Scottish Poetry Library&#8217;s small press fair, By Leaves We Live. I need to make a lot of books for my table at that event, so it wouldn&#8217;t be fair to myself to stack driving lessons and studying for the theory test on top of that and my regular work (which is busy lately).<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p>But that means starting in November. Then I go to Canada for December, and I don&#8217;t see myself getting comfortable and ready for my test in a single month. If I put it off until the new year, though, I&#8217;d really have to put it off until the spring, &#8217;cause learning to drive in the middle of winter seems crazy.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p>(If you&#8217;re still reading this back-and-forth mental chatter, thank you.)<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p>So what do you think? Is it worth starting&#8221;&#8221;even if that means starting-and-stopping&#8221;&#8221;just to get going? Or should I wait and do it all in a stretch?<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Hello, friend. I&#8217;m here at the pub, ploughing through my e-mail, fiercely trying to get to &#8220;inbox zero,&#8221; and there&#8217;s one to-do I&#8217;m stumped by: when should I start my driving lessons? After months of putting it off and genuinely not knowing how to choose, I finally picked a driving instructor. We&#8217;d exchanged a few [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15383","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15383","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15383"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15383\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15383"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15383"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15383"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}