Abby cracked us up Saturday on the way home on the airplane. We got onto the plane and she pretty much immediately grabbed the safety card out of the seat back before her. She opened it up and told me she wanted a ‘nose bag.’
That’s right, some people call them oxygen masks, but we call them nose bags now 🙂
I am at my in-laws in IN [that is the kind of alliteration that I dream of using on a daily bases]. They have teenage girls which means that they have AOL. This is part of standards compliance for teenager girls apparently. I am logging in on my wireless laptop at least. However, AOL totally barfed on my older version installed on this laptop. All it did was log me into their network and give me internet access. None of the AOL crap loaded up. None of the crap was blinking, popping, fading in and out, or demanding my attention. It is beautiful. It is the first time AOL has brought a smile to my face in a long, long time.
This morning at about 7:35 I turned in the keys to Enterprise Rent-a-Caliber and am finally rid of the Dodge Caliber. I don’t want you to think that I hate the car, except that I do. I have had 4 men (I notice that women dont’ do this) ask me how I like it when the family piles out of the vehicle. Each one got a standard three word response, “I hate it.” Yeah, that’s a pretty strong statement to make about a car. Except that a car that big and heavy needs a very serious engine, 6 cylinders at least, or maybe an iVTEC 4 cylinder engine that pushes various Hondas around. The 4 banger inside the Caliber is most at home at a red light. It purs and hums there until the light turns green. If you stomp on the gas the car gets even more fidgety because it doesn’t know how to accelerate. I was at a left hand turn, the light was green and a car was more than a quarter mile down the road so I thought I had room to turn left. I hit the gas. The gas laughed (laughing gas?), the car jittered forward and finally started to move smoothly as I was narrowly into the left hand turn lane before the other vehicle was going through the same intersection.
The upsides of the low visibility windows that the Caliber has are many and varied. For example, not being able to see means your body will be in a relaxed state when you get into the accident instead of being tensed up. Another fine quality of low visibility is that bullets flying at you from outside of a car in a high speed chase will have a smaller target if they have to go through the glass. Of course most bullets would whip through the steel doors make that less of an issue. The last upside I’m going to mention is that not seeing where your hood is makes it more likely for you to stay back from other vehicles at a red light because you wouldn’t want to bump into them. 15 feet until the next car may or may not be how far back I was from them… I don’t know, it was hard to tell unless I got out of the car to look.
There are some nice features that I have mentioned before like lights in the cup holders at night. A stereo that sounds so horrible that you actually drive with it off so that your focus is more on the road (that you can’t see so well, anyway) helps. There is a drink cooler in the dashboard. Nice. I can have cold drinks while I drive, but do I want to be driving? Last, but not least, I love the fact that the ‘large storage space’ in the back is not any larger than my Honda Civic’s was. Who needs to put things in the back of a vehicle? Not me for sure. Our stroller barely fit in the back with anything else.
If you see a Caliber on the road, steer clear of them, they’re a mobile accident waiting to happen.
Abby is now playing ‘Cars’ due to the movie and when she pretends to be a car she is the one and only star of the movie “Lightning the Queen.” The actual Cars charact name is Lightning McQueen but Abby’s cultural references are a bit limited 🙂
My mother-in-law has inherited a stick shift Nissan truck from the early 90’s. It has a mere 80,000 miles, which is just so few. The truck has been well maintained and the body is in great shape. Last night she asked me to get some gas for her in it and I got to drive a stick shift for the first time in years. Such fun! I stalled the thing out 3 times in the King Sooper parking lot, but hey, its like learning all over again without my grandpa in the car. Did I ever tell you that story?
You see I asked my grandpa Peterman to teach me how to drive a stick shift. So he took me to a nice flat, sandy, isolated place (which is hard to find in the hills where he lives, well, level is at least) and helped me learn about shifting the gears, finding the right shifting points in his Chevy Luv, and getting used to a stick. Then he let me drive home from that point (on a non-public dirt road, I was 15, I think). Except for one thing: at a point on the road to his house the road is just as wide as the cars (plus a few feet, I’m sure) but drops off into a small stream on both sides. At that point the road is inclined. At that point my grandpa had me stop the truck and stop the engine. And then he asked me to start the truck and continue on my way up to his house. Yikes! I panicked and freaked out and probably was 10 times more dangerous. I let the truck drift backwards and then slammed on the breaks in major fear. My grandpa chuckled as I switched places with him (having set the parking break, put the truck in reverse and swore to God above that I would never drive a stick again). He smoothly drove us back up the hill and to his house explaining to me the physics and mechanics of driving.
I’m glad there aren’t steep hills and muddy streams in the King Sooper parking lot. It makes it a lot easier for me to get going again. Oh, and just in case you think I don’t deal with stick shifts well I happen to have inherited that Luv later on when I was 16 and driven it for a few short months until I scraped it down the side of my parents Camry 🙂
The last couple times I’ve grilled non-Steak meats on the grill I have undercooked them the first time they were on the grill. This was driving me crazy! Then I realized that I have been cooking everything like its steak, and so I’m a complete moron and the problem is not my grill or the meat. So, next time I grill non-steak meats on the grill I am going to do it right. people will once again be able to eat when I say the food is done on the grill and not so much gagging, running for the bathroom and losing their appetite when they cut into mostly raw armadillo.
Well, today the ‘adjuster’ came out and looked at my car. I liked him, his name was Andy and he had a goatee. It was like a taller version of myself with brown curly hair, a slender body and boots on. Who has a different job. Who lives in a different part of Colorado with a different family. Yeah, we had a lot in common.
Andy told me that due to the fact that the outside and inside of the quarter panel and trunk had been damaged that most likely the auto-body people would tell him that it would cost a quadrillion-bazillion-trillion-finity dollars to fix the car and that it would be cheaper to buy a new one. Heck, I only paid tens of thousands for the car in the first place, with repair bills that high its a bit steep to put it in ‘ship shape’ condition. Not that I want to go sailing in a Honda Civic.
So, in short there’s a 95% chance that I’m going to be making a deal with the devil car dealer soon so that I can drive a new pimped ride.
If you’re a gal whose male counterpart is a ‘gas man’ then you may need this shirt.
Thanks to Tony for the idea 🙂
Saturday I called Geico to follow up on my claim and was given a toll-free 800 number for future contact with my claim. Just now I called that number. That number had a recording telling me that the adult line had been moved to a 900 number.
Woops! I don’t want to pay $9.95 for insurance information!
This morning I did announcements and sung along with the songs (though it was not like when I traditionally lead the worship). Part of this responsibility is reading the passage that will be taught on in its entirety so that people have a general idea of where we’re at in the series (currently Isaiah). I had to read a passage in Isaiah 22. Except that when I got to the 24th verse that reads:
So they will hang on him all the glory of his father’s house, offspring and issue, all the least of vessels, from bowls to all the jars.
I screwed up. Instead of ‘bowls’ out popped ‘bowels.’  I don’t know what mental image that brings for you, but I quickly corrected myself and went on. Wow. Bowels. Pardon me while I mention that was a “crappy” slip up [that play on words was for Jenny Dalton, who will more than likely not actually read this post].
I was exhausted by the end of the main service because I had to teach on the errors of Christian Science (an MP3 can be downloaded/streamed at that link) during the adult Sunday School class. Then I had to lead the main service (as mentioned before) and to end it all I had managed to talk or sing for over an hour and a half. That’s a lot for a guy who quietly sits in front of a computer desk most of the time and doesn’t engage in hardly enough social activity. However, there is just something fun about slip ups like this for others, they get to see that Randy Peterman is most definitely human, and that the folks that are leading are not there to put on a show.