Car-ma and Awesome Vanity Plates

As I grew up, the automotive theme in my family was "it's a good car if it gives you lots of warning, or at least makes sure you're safe before it dies." Which, granted, ascribes a fair bit of free will to our four-wheeled partners, but, hey, we named them, too.

Bun-bun the diesel VW Rabbit had a habit of dropping mufflers up and down the east coast (Canadian camping grounds, the Expressway leaving Fenway Park, etc.), but even sounding like a giant, percussion-heavy marching band, he got us where we were going. Steve the pickup truck stuck with me through my first couple of years behind the wheel before politely leaking gas to let me know that the connection between his cab and his bed was about to let go.

These days, Arizona's and my beloved Subaru Baja, Roo, is well on his way to joining those hallowed ranks of Good Cars. Last summer, he gave us fair warning that he wasn't feeling well on the day before a planned road trip. Which was annoying, sure, but better the day before than a few hundred miles down the road! Similarly, this past week, my sweetie and I were on our way to the dentist for his-and-hers cleanings, when one of Roo's rear wheels started making a godawful grinding noise and he dragged to one side, like a pony that had just gotten a pointy rock stuck in his hoof and was tossing his head and going "Get it out, get it out, get it out!"

We pulled over. We stared at the tire and brakes. Arizona stuck his head under, to see if we were dragging something. Failing to find anything we could see, we went through the usual "parking brake on, parking brake off, back up, wiggle around, go fast, go slow" routine, and what do you know? Things started sounding better and better, until we could only reproduce the grinding noise with a hard turn to the right.

As an aside, this pleased me. I really hate handing a car to a mechanic and describing a problem he (or she, of course, but mostly he) can't reproduce. It's like taking a day off to ship a horse to the expensive vet clinic for a comprehensive lameness exam, only to have it walk off the trailer sound as a dollar.

Which left the question of what to do? Should we turn around? Keep going onto the highway? We would need to get on the highway with him at some point to get him to the shop, as it's ... Well, what do you know? The shop is right down the street from the dentist. 

So off we hied to get our fangs cleaned, then dropped Roo off with our most excellent mechanics, and picked up a loaner to drive home, only a half hour late getting Arizona back to his desk. And thus Roo (in addition to only needing a fairly easy and inexpensive repair) proved himself once again to be a Good Car.

Because did I mention we were planning an eight-hour, four-state drive on Saturday to visit a friend? Yeah, that. And while it wouldn't have been the end of the world to break down on some highway between here and there on a Saturday, it would've been a whole lot less convenient than toodling down the road with nice clean teeth for a two-hour repair.

Instead, our road trip passed in hours of pleasant conversation, Arizona's continued marveling at how us transplanted Bostonians choose to pronounce our place names (often only hitting one or two out of every three letters), and a game of 'spot the best vanity plate.' Because I can only guess that it's really cheap to get a vanity plate in Maine, because there were LOTS of them.

There was the SUV that was RN-N-L8 and doing eighty in the middle lane. It took me a second, but then I grinned. "Running late!"

There was the white hatchback that proclaimed itself a HERO. Since it was a Purple Heart plate and wore USMC stickers, I'll take that as fact rather than braggadocio. 

There was the big, badass pickup truck that claimed to be YR FATHR. I'm not sure if it was meant to be biblical, Star Wars or Jerry Springer, but it was memorable.

Then there was the usual gaggle of names, initials, and inside jokes that Arizona and I could only guess at. But it got us reminiscing about vanity plates we have known and loved, like the red VW Beetle named LADYBG, and a variety of horsey themed plates I have seen at the shows over the years, versions on EQUIT-8 and JUMP IT. 

My all-time favorite, though, was one I saw back when I was a kid, maybe on one of those familial road trips: a white VW Rabbit whose plate said IM LATE. 

Mind you, I was old enough (and had a weirdly esoteric sense of the world stemming from reading anything I could get my hands on) that at first I thought it meant someone was pregnant and, to quote Aerosmith, the rabbit done died. Upon following the in-car discussion, however, I acknowledged it was probably an Alice in Wonderland reference. And a cool one, at that.

Me? I've never had a vanity plate. Thought about it, sure, but I just haven't been able to settle on a seven-character string that works. It's made even more complicated by Arizona's and my choosing to be a one-car family, since we do most everything together anyway. So for now, we're ... well, whatever numbers and letters Roo is wearing (I think there's a Y in there somewhere). And we're grateful to him for giving us plenty of warning that he needs to see a car doctor!

How about you? Does your car have a name? Do you have a favorite vanity plate? Have you seen a funny/awful one? Let's collect them!

Battle of the sexes: to obsess or not obsess, that is the question

Arizona and I are headed for a major (happy) Life Change, and as the big old countdown to Holy Crap chugs along, I am aware of (and amused by) a major difference between the two of us. To put it in writing terms: I'm a plotter and he's a pantser.

A plotter does her research, thinks about the book's beginning, middle and end, and has a pretty good idea of what is going to happen before she starts writing. A pantser (no, autocorrect, I don't mean 'panther,' even though panthers are Very Cool) dives right in to writing the story and makes it up as he goes along. He might have a high-level idea of the story (hm... I think I'm going to write an alien love story set against a geopolitical movement involving hard cheese), but he figures out the rest of it on the fly.

I have been both a plotter and a pantser (nope, still don't mean 'panther') over the years, in both my stories and my life, and the thing is, I'm convinced that I eventually wind up with the same product in the end--I just got there two different ways. And just as when I'm in plotting mode, it would stress me out to have to shift gears and write into the mist (without a plan), when I'm in pantsing mode, I don't want anybody hovering over me, telling me it's time to plot.

So, too with me and Arizona. 

This past weekend, we went to an all-day class to help us prepare for our Big-Happy. It included videos. Do you remember the spaghetti films from Driver's Ed? The ones with lots of blood and gore, and messages like "don't drink and drive" and "don't drive distracted"? Yeah, they were like that. There were flip-books, too, and some unsettling Q&A periods. Afterwards, when a family member of Arizona's asked how class went, he replied, "It was fine. Good to know where to park and how to find the cafeteria."

Ah, the male perspective. 

Me? I came away from class feeling more settled about the whole process. I, too, am happy to know where to put the car and how to find food. But I also like knowing all the other details, including What Could Go Wrong and What To Do If It Does. See? Plotter. Arizona, on the other hand, would far rather pretend the day didn't happen--because if it did, then he has to worry that Something Might Go Wrong that He Can't Prevent. Pantser.

And you know what? I'm okay with that. In fact, I like it. It's one of the many ways we balance each other out. He reminds me to enjoy today and not spend so much time thinking ahead, while willingly (or at least without active foot-dragging) going along with things when I announce: "I need a plan." Not to mention, we really do seem to wind up at the same destination nine times out of ten, even coming at things from different directions ... and the tenth time is usually that much more interesting because of our different takes on things.

So how about you? Plotter or pantser? (Or, apparently, 'panther'?) Would you rather know what's coming or find yourself surprised? 

Paging Darwin ...

How the heck did it get to be November already? I mean, I see the leaves and my breath did the dragon thing first thing this morning when I went out to the car, but really? November? When did that happen?

Anyway, some of you may know that the N-month is the home of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), when (insert Carl Sagan voice) billions and billions of writers and aspiring writers (okay, maybe not that many, but that's how it feels sometimes) register on the handy dandy (if sometimes snail-slow) website, challenging themselves to write 50,000 words during the course of the month.

Mind you, they don't have to be good words. They just have to be words. In fact, you're not supposed to look back and revise. At. All. You're just supposed to write forward and Get It Done.

I was messaging the other day with a writer-editor-book-reviewer (WEBR) friend who is also doing NaNo this year, and we got to talking about how the whole 'don't revise' thing can be a real challenge, especially for the sort of writer who wants to get stuff perfect before they move on. It went something like this (paraphrasing):

Me: I try to keep reminding myself that my first drafts all come out pretty much the same, quality-wise, whether I write them in three months or nine. I just gotta push through and remember that at this stage, it's all fixable.

WEBR: If you're just starting to figure that out, I'm screwed. 

Me: LOL. Or, more like it's one of those lessons I find myself needing to learn over and over and over again ...

Which got me thinking about those sorts of lessons. You know, the ones where you tell yourself "I'm totally going to remember this for the rest of my life" but then find yourself--days, months or years down the road--either forgetting and doing The Thing, then kicking yourself because you darn well know better ... or (and here's where I get caught) thinking to yourself "maybe it'll be different this time, seeing how I'm older/wiser/thinner/fatter/whatever."

For me, the list of Lessons That Somehow Don't Stick includes the following, in no particular order:

Don't try to make your first draft perfect. Just get it done and fix it later. (See above)

The spot where food touches a microwaveable plate gets flipping hot. 

I initially learned this lesson about an hour after my parents got their first microwave, which was approximately the size of a large dog crate and covered in vinyl made to look like fake wood paneling. Being the curious sort, I found myself thinking "I wonder what would happen to chewing gum in the microwave?" So I loaded a couple of sticks of Big Red on a plate, stuck them in the microwave, and pressed my nose to the glass, watching as the sticks wavered and melted, then started bubbling like something out of a pink-tinged swamp. Awesome! The next step, of course, was to pull out the plate and see if the gum still tasted the same ... except that in the process of removing said plate, I put several fingers squarely beneath the melted gum, resulting in much howling, tears, and second degree burns. And I never did get to eat the gum.

You'd think that would've learned me, right? Wrong. I can't tell you how many times I've burned myself by mistaking the boundary between sort-of safe, non-food zone and the feck-that's-hot food zone post-nuking. Just last week, in fact, with clam chowder ...

Paging Darwin.

**As a corollary (why do I always think there are more Rs than Ls in that word?) to the Microwave Lesson: Glass pans that have been baking in the oven are hot everywhere.

I have no clue why it has taken me more than one burn to figure out that I can't adjust the position of the brownies or lasagna, or take them out of the oven, with my bare hands or a single layer of kitchen towel for protection. 

Well, actually, I do have a clue, but it's kind of embarrassing (a word that I'm convinced should have fewer Rs in it). You see, it never happens when I'm baking with a metal pan ... 'cause, yanno, you don't put metal in the microwave. Glass, on the other hand, goes just fine in the microwave, and you can handle it by the parts that aren't touching the food. 

Why would my brain fail to trip the mental fuse that says "You just opened the oven, blondie, not the microwave, so NO TOUCHY!" you might ask. Beats me. Paging Darwin.

I'm pretty sure I had one more of these when I was thinking about this post last night in the shower (as you do) ... but darned if I can remember what it was (paging Darwin). So I'll throw it out there to you, my ReaderFriends ... What lessons have you have to re-learn over and over again? (Please, tell me I'm not the only one!)

A Donut Quest and a Germaphobe's Nightmare ...

This past weekend, given that rare conjunction--gorgeous weather and an empty calendar--I set out to find something fun for Arizona and I to do, and came up with a visit to a local cider mill. From the website, it seemed to check all the necessary boxes:

Cool history for Arizona ... It has one of the country's oldest steam-powered cider presses still in use. Check.

Cool machinery for Arizona ... Ditto, with demos at 11, 1 and 3. Check.

Something for me ... Can you say freshly baked apple cider donuts?? CHECK! And I'm into old, cool stuff with demos, too. 

The morning began with a power outage that foiled our bacon-and-egg plans, but we're nothing if not flexible. We discussed breaking out the camp stove or sparking up the fire pit ... then we said "screw it" and went out for breakfast. Thus fortified, we did some chores and then headed over for the late demo and to score some donuts, the mention of which had earned a raised eyebrow from my beloved.

Arizona: Apple cider donuts? I didn't know there was such a thing.

Me: You'll love them. And if you don't, I'll eat yours. (No, autocorrect, I didn't mean 'I'll eat you.' That's a very different blog post, thankyouverymuch!)

Upon turning onto the proper road, we came upon cars parked on both sides of the and pedestrians jamming the road. Goodness. This was more of a thing than I had realized! We did some maneuvering, wedged the Roo into a safe-seeming spot despite my suckitude when it comes to parallel parking, and flung ourselves into what turned out to be a cider demo, free wine tasting, free hard cider tasting, a farmer's market with goat products, honey, and all sorts of other local stuff, a live band, and an incredible-smelling building with huge lines for the donuts. Wheee!

The cider-pressing demo rocked so hard that I didn't take any pictures, I was too busy watching (old stuff is cool!), but once we got in the donut line, we had time to look around, listen to some music, get to know our neighbors in line, and generally check things out. And I saw a couple of things I thought were pretty funny. For one, here's the line for the free wine tasting:

The railing on the left is the start of a twenty-foot ramp leading up to the wine booth. Decent line, right? Well, here's the back half of the donut line we were standing in. There were this many people again between us and getting into the bakery.

And there was another, similar line on the other side of the building!

Once we got closer, we were funneled between huge crates of these babies:

Which is cool, right? Hey, it's a cider mill. Why not buy some apples while you're there? And at sixty cents a pound, can you say bargain? Except that the slow-moving line gave us plenty of opportunity to watch every child between us and the bakery (the ones that had been playing in the driveway gravel and licking kettle corn residue off their fingers) reach in, pick up the apples, show each other the squishy spots, maybe toss them around, and then, when a line-glazed parental unit did a "put that back!" drop them in the nearest crate and scamper off. 

Me: Can I borrow your phone?

Arizona: Sure. Why?

Me: I want to get a picture of this. (My dumbphone sort of has a camera, but I can't actually email myself the resulting photos. Fortunately, hubby has a real phone.)

Arizona: Again, why?

Me (snapping away): Because this is a germaphobe's nightmare. Kind of like those ball pits at Chucky Cheese. Just think of all the people who have touched these apples, and where their hands have been! Kinda makes you want to wear a hazmat suit, maybe use a black light.

Arizona (looking suddenly jaundiced): Do those apples go into the cider, do you think?

Me: It's pasteurized.

Arizona: What about those worm holes? Can you get parasites from apples?

Me: Note to self--Don't joke to hubby about contaminants the day after watching a Monsters Inside Me marathon, especially when Ebola is in the news.

The donuts, by the way, were the bomb. As was the hot mulled cider. And Arizona is sold on both of them, cooties and all!

Are you a 'Weener?

Last year plus a couple of weeks, it went like this:

Me: Okay, I'm going to head out and do a bread-eggs-milk run.

Arizona: You want company?

Me: Your call. I know you've had a long day. But if you stay here, remember that tonight it's okay if people knock on our door wearing masks. 

Arizona (stiffening): Why is that?

Me: You know. Halloween? 

Arizona: That's tonight? 

Me: Mmm-hmm.

Arizona: Is there candy?

Me: A dozen or so Kit-Kats, by the door. (Between the ski-slope driveway and relative lack of kidlets in the neighborhood, ours is *not* a prime trick-or-treating house.) Save me one, okay?

Arizona (salutes): Got it. Don't eat all the Kit-Kats, and don't pepper spray the neighbors.

Me: Words to live by. I think I'll go embroider it on a towel.

It's true--we're not big Halloweeners. In fact, I'd say we're not all that big on most 'official' holidays, as Arizona would far rather give gifts when the mood strikes him, rather than being told it's time to buy-buy-buy! Granted, this hasn't yet translated to him randomly deciding to dress up as a pirate on a given Thursday for his own version of Halloween, but a girl can hope, can't she? 

Me, I just go with the flow for the most part, and put my foot down now and then when it's important to me. Like with our 'I don't care what you call it, but I'm decorating a tree and you're getting presents whether you like it or not' on December 25. And I know that when the day comes that I get an itch to dress up and do the Halloween thing, he'll be a sweetie and play along (especially if I tell him that we're dressing up as zombie mountain bikers). 

So how about you? Are you partying this year? Dressing up? Dressing up your house and expecting an onslaught of goblins and ghouls? Or are you going to eat all the Kit Kats and guard the perimeter like a certain someone?

Lumpy White Tights and Other Misheard Lyrics

Arizona (singing to himself as he putters around, collecting mountain bike parts off the living room floor): I been through the desert on a horse with no name, it felt good to be out on the range ...

Me (slaps own forehead): Oh, wow. That makes so much more sense!

Arizona: 'Scuse me?

Me: My whole life, I thought the line was "it felt good to be out of the rain."

Arizona: Why would he be out of the rain if he's riding his horse?

Me: Because he's in the desert?

Arizona: It rains in the desert, you know. Sometimes.

Me: Maybe it's the dry season. Or he had an umbrella. But, yeah, that's why "out on the range" makes oodles more sense. Kind of like the lumpy white tights.

Arizona (pauses, like he's pretty sure he's going to regret asking): What lumpy white tights?

Me: You remember Def Leppard, right? 

(Arizona and I are only a couple of years apart in age, and share many of our musical likes. Hair bands of the 80s are not one of them. Doc Jess = headbanger. Arizona = not so much. He also doesn't share my antipathy for the B-52s, while I don't act like I have a brain tumor when the radio plays Hotel California or Heard it Through the Grapevine.)

Arizona: *nods*

Me: Well they've got this song, Love Bites, that starts off with a whispered line that darn sure sounds like the lead singer is saying, "If you have lumpy white tights ... Watch out! Love ... Bites ..."

Arizona: Lumpy white tights? That's ... oddly specific.

Me: No kidding. And it was like he was inside my head, or saw the pictures from my fifth grade band concert or something. And he was singing just for me. Hey. I was thirteen, okay? Anyway, I sang it that way for the longest time, until one day I was studying the insert that came with my copy of the tape--the way you do when you're a squealing fangirl--and came across the actual lyrics. It was supposed to be "If you have love in your sights, watch out. Love bites."

Arizona: Meh. Boring.

Me: I know, right? At least the lumpy white tights make a girl think for a minute. Kind of like riding through the desert on a nameless horse, carrying an umbrella.

So what about you, ReaderFriends? What's your favorite misheard lyric?

That OMG Moment ... (aka Apple Rapture)

... when you realize that you've become your mother. Yeah, I just had one of those. 

Mind you, the Scallion (She is called thus because I often wear Many Layers that I successively peel out of or put back on to keep my reptilian body temp about right. So Arizona calls me the Onion, and my maternal unit, being smaller and skinnier than I, yet having the same tendency, is therefore the Scallion.) is an extremely cool person, practically a force of nature. I want to be parts of her when I grow up. Just maybe not *exactly* like her. 

Take, for example, apples.

This past weekend was one of those "ermagherd, winter's coming" fall weekends when native New Englanders are genetically programmed to start lining their nests. For Arizona and I, who are constantly waging war against our kW/hr reading on the electric bill (alas, our Little House In The Trees is a bummer for solar conversion because it's, well, In The Trees), this entailed shoring up the caulking and weatherstripping around our doors and packing away our two small window AC units. Which meant *removing* the weatherstripping we had used to airtight them four months ago.

Weatherstripping ... sigh. You can't get the stuff to stick when and where you want, and when you finally do, it's in the place where you're going to want to peel it off six months later while preserving as much of your wood finish as possible. Amiright?

Enter DocJess, a wallpaper scraper, a butter knife, a bottle of nail polish remover (in the house expressly for such purposes, as I can't remember the last time my nails saw polish), and a whole lot of contortionism (no Autocorrect, I don't mean 'a whole lot of contortionists', though that would've been entertaining). And let's just say that after a couple of hours of painstaking, finger-cramping work, getting out of the house and doing a different chore sounded really good to me. 

Me: What do you say we blow this popsicle stand and go get some supplies? We're running pretty low.

Arizona (makes face): On a Sunday? Yuck. Let's just eat what's here and go shopping some night this week.

As an up-until-recent-years lifelong bachelor who's been through some lean times, he's often perfectly content to subsist on whatever his environment provides, until the kitchen looks like it's been stripped by locusts and dinner consists of microwave popcorn and a mustard sandwich, hold the bread. Whereupon, he'll go hunting, slay a mammoth, and load up his cave for the next round. Me? Not so much. I want what I want in the food department, especially when I'm feeling a little put-upon by chores.

Me: I'll just run down the street, then, and pick up a few things to hold us over a couple of days.

Since Arizona (bless his father and general life view for this one) believes that Real Men Go Grocery Shopping With Their Wives, he grumbled only a little and said, "I'll get my shoes."

Me: We can buy beers.

Arizona (perks up): I'll drive.

So we went down the street to the expensive market where we don't do our big shopping (because, yanno, expensive), and we did the sort of supply run I usually associate with blizzards. You know--milk, bread, eggs, beer. (We've got batteries stockpiled.) 

Arizona: All set?

Me: Just need to a quick run through the fruit section. 

And by 'quick,' I mean twice the time it took us to do the rest of the store. Because ... APPLES! 

You see, apple season in New England is a wonderful time, when the selection of apples expands from the year-round Mac-red-delicious-golden-delicious sameness to offer new and interesting names. Gala! Braeburn! Fuji! 

Now, fifteen years ago, when I lived up in Massachusetts nearer to the Scallion, there was a neighborhood orchard that offered all these beauties (and more) fresh off the tree. Me? I lived on pizza, Dunkin' Donuts and Lean Pockets, and when my maternal unit waxed enthusiastic about the different apple flavors and her efforts to uncover the formula for a Perfect Pie (was it three Galas to Two Braeburns or the other way around?), I would nod and smile, and think, "Dude, they're just apples."

Mind you, I was more than happy to taste test, because she makes a killer pie. But apples were apples to me. Until yesterday, when I found myself jumping up and down in the Expensive Market and whooping, "HONEYCRISPS!!!"

Arizona: Dude, they're just apples. Aren't they?

Which they are, of course. But they're super yummy, too. What's more, they mean that the good parts of fall are here--like pies, gorgeous days, pretty leaves and dubious cornstalk decor. And we'd better remember to enjoy them, because pretty soon the world is going to be cold and white here, and the honeycrisps are going to be gone. 

So, dear ReaderFriends, enjoy the moment, eat an apple (or the seasonal indulgence of your choice), and remember to look around yourself and find something that makes you smile. The big things in life are important, but it's the little things that set the mood. I wish you a happy one today :)