ON THE ROAD AGAIN

A little over a year ago, I took a new job at the Home, part of my reinvention.

This position came with a lot of opportunities for travel throughout Virginia.

Oh my gosh, this was great - ROAD TRIP!!

Adding to that happiness, I can find sprinklings of family and friends to see all over the state. 

 This isn't Virginia, but it's a road.

I was happier than a puppy with two peters.

(obscure movie reference - who knows it?.............hint? Billy Crystal)

Got to see more of BS, BNs (beloved nieces), BBS (beloved big sister) & BC (beloved cousin).

I was content. Life was good again. Then the added bonus...

A mere weeks into the new job, M&M entered my life again after a hiatus of 38ish years.

After a few months, he was becoming indispensable.

And now, even though I still love the travel, I get lonely for him when I'm gone.

The upside is that, not only do I usually get to see beloved people when I'm away

(since I can often stay with them),

but I have a beloved person waiting for me when I come home.

Don't that make the homecoming sweet! Much better than coming home to an empty house.

The traveling will continue.

It's a good thing, though.

If he didn't get a break from me every once in awhile,

he would soon realize that I don't really have anything all that interesting to say.

They're Called "Vanity Plates" For A Reason

A site that I look at regularly had a post recently about the road trips of the author's youth.
The post was really about modern road trips,
wherein each whiny brat has his own personal DVD player
and doesn't have to interact with another family member the entire time.

I thought about the road trips of my own youth with my sisters.
Remember arguing with each other and yelling "Daddy! She touched me!"?
And Daddy saying "Don't make me stop this car."

We had bubble gum chewing contests with my mother on our way to the beach.
And we slept in the back seat leaning against each other like toppled statues.
This is me & my sisters on our way to Ocean Isle, NC.
Looks like that awkward stage again, huh?
Scary.
The slide is old & faded, and I don't know how to fix that yet. Sorry RAD.


We would load up my father's Bug and go to Rehoboth Beach in Delaware
to stay at a big old rambling hotel owned by friends of the family.
That's us with some of them in this picture with my father behind the camera.
See the girl in the white shirt, 2nd from the right, next to the girl with the long blond hair?
She is now hugely famous, and not always in a good way.
Click on the picture to enlarge it and see if you can figure it out.


Remember playing the Snug Bug game?
I think the kids are playing that again, complete with overly hard arm punches.
(In fact, I think BS still does.)
Although now they call it "Punch Buggy".
What do they know?

Remember playing the license plate game to see how many states you could find?
Wasn't hard to do since most states had easily identifiable tags.
There were unique combinations of letters, numbers, colors, state mottos & sometimes an image.
We could tell a Colorado plate from way down the road by its green & white mountain design.


Pennsylvania had that odd mustard colored plate.


Florida was "The Sunshine State" . . .


. . . and later the state's outline in unmistakeable orange.

(license plate pics courtesy of this site)

Can't do that anymore, as each state has about 1,496 different patterns available.
Look here at just of a few of the ones you can get in Virginia.

And, of course, all of these road trips were taken in the summer.
With NO air conditioning.
They are some of my fondest memories.
Take THAT, spoiled modern kids!

But I digress.
This all got me thinking about the idiotic vanity plates I encounter on a regular basis.
Are they nuts?
They pay money, every year, to announce this kind of stuff?
I saw these in the last week.

"THK JCY"
Dude, THAT I don't need to know about you.
And yes, it was a young man driving, but I had no way of verifying his claim.
Darn. But something tells me I didn't miss much.

"FXY LDY"
Does anyone else share that high opinion of yourself, Missy?
She had on an overly tight shirt.

"EUNIQUE"
Excuse me, but aren't we all?
Didn't see who was driving.

"IBEFAST"
Another young man.
Should have read, "IBEFAILINGENGLISHANDFLIPPINGBURGERSFORALIVING".
Or "IBEGONNAGETATICKETFERSURE".

I found one on the internet machine that said "COPBAIT" on a little sports car.
He'll NEVER talk his way out of a ticket.

Here is a link to a few more.
The first one says "IDIOT".
I have a feeling that announcing it on your car is redundant.

Some were so borderline profane, I won't show them here.
But go see for yourself, or here, and mock them to your heart's content.
If they make you feel intellectually or smugly superior, don't worry.
It's not vanity.

Leave comments with your guess as to Mystery Girl
and the worst vanity plates you have encountered.
I'll post the answer in a couple days.


update: I confess.
After looking at the VA plates available, I want one.
I am ashamed of myself.
And I know what I want it to say - a personalized plate.
I am doubly ashamed of myself.
I have been sucked in.
But I won't be announcing my questionable physical attributes or obvious mental deficiencies.

Quotes

I have found 2 quotes that express the "mid-life crisis" I have been experiencing lately:

"Though no one can go back and make a brand new start,
anyone can start from now and make a brand new ending." Carl Bard

This one kind of sums up why I started this blog in the first place,
and why I want to find the new & improved version of myself.
Didn't like the way my life was going, so it was time to change it.

Unfortunately, there are still a lot of things in my life that are a source of dissatisfaction,
and the process of turning them around is a bitch.

Also, I want Brandon to have a new ending. Who can resist this face . . . .

(The one on the right, not the Hokie Bird)

So wanting to make his life just a teeny bit better caused me to
promise to put him in one of these contraptions . . . .


. . . . and do this for more miles that I am comfortable with . . . .

By the way - this is Team Hoyt, the inspiration for my endeavor.
Brandon met them, too, and was inspired
to convince me to endure pain & agony to make him into a racer.

Here's where I explained all this monkey business.


"Life is like a new car. Every once in a while you've got to find an open road and see what it will do."

This quote is the one from Christmas Day on my 2008 "Life's Little Instruction Book" calendar,
so I really don't know who said it.

I came very close to doing this last year.
I applied for and was offered a teaching position in Texas that I would have really really liked.
I want to teach again so badly that sometimes I hate even the thought of going to work each day.

Don't misunderstand,
I love the place that I work
(you won't find one better),
but I don't always love what I do there.
What I do there is noble and honorable.
I love the people I work with,
I'm nuts about my kids,
but I am a teacher at heart, and I miss it dreadfully.
Seriously.

To explain why I am not a teacher anymore would take more effort than I want to expend just now.

The job in Texas was soooooo very tempting.
Just the kind of place I like - a small city with a big university.
Rolling hills, friendly people, staff who really wanted to hire me.
But it turned out that it wasn't the right . . . oh, I don't know . . . time?
There were family considerations & a sucky real estate market, among other things.
But I wanted to take it, oh so very much.

Just about every miserable, rotten thing that has ever happened to me
has happened here, in this area.

Every now & then I look.
The job is still open, and I wonder,
"What if?"
"Did I do the right thing?"
"What if I just told them I changed my mind, packed it all up & started over?"

The open road calls me,
beckoning like a seductive temptress,
stroking my terminal case of wanderlust.

My will power leaves a lot to be desired.



These open roads are from the long road trip BS & took 2 1/2 years ago.
1 month,
8,300 miles,
from one end of this great country to the other,
side-to-side & top-to-bottom.

I would do it again in a heartbeat.

About Me

You will notice, on the right-hand side of the page, a section labeled "About Me". I have not yet decided how much personal information I will put there, especially since anyone in the known universe will be able to read it, not that many would even want to, but still. I'll just trickle things in there from time to time.

There is an image attached to that section. I think I will change it periodically. Today it is...

I am a sucker for pretty cloud pictures, and I took this one a couple years ago when ... wait, do I give the son's actual name here? Make up an alias? I could always refer to him as 'Beloved Son', or BS for short. Let me just trot on back to his den and ask him...........

The answer is - he doesn't mind using his real name, but was intrigued by the BS moniker, as those of you who know him might well imagine. So...

I took this one a couple years ago when BS & I went on a cross-country road trip over the course of a month. The cloud appeared somewhere in the southwest, if memory serves. We made quite a few stops on our journey: New Orleans, Texas, Arizona, Mexico, San Diego, Los Angeles, Sacramento, Roseville (CA), Rocky Mountain National Park for a family reunion, Iowa, Chicago, Canada, and home. It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Well, maybe twice-in-a-lifetime, because I'm ready to do it again. The nicest part is that BS & I get along well enough so that a fun time was had by all.

Uh-oh, I just thought of something. If he is BS, does that make me BS's BM?