Pickles & Dimes

This year was pretty uneventful. We went in the morning, so we were less tempted to eat giant turkey drumsticks or chicken fried bacon. It also got hot pretty quickly and we forgot sunscreen, so we weren’t very hungry. We shared a lot of our food, too. Here’s the final food tally (we were there from 9:00 a.m. until 2:00 p.m., so we hit both breakfast and lunch):

- Mini donuts (shared)
- Big Fat Bacon (shared)
- Cheese curds (Jason)
- Root beer (shared)
- Alligator nuggets with gator-shaped fries (shared)
- Mountain Dew (shared)
- Water (shared)
- S’more on a stick (me)
- Frozen chocolate-covered banana (me)
- Blue raspberry snowcone (Jason)

Photos!

It was a perfect day to be outside:

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Man, I hated riding the school bus. HATED it. Coupled with my motion sickness, inhaling the stench of diesel fumes every afternoon for an hour (my brother and I were one of the last kids off) ensured that every time I got home, I’d spend a few minutes violently dry heaving next to the mailbox.

We lived on top of a hill, so we had the advantage of seeing our bus turn at an intersection a mile away and know that we had about 10 minutes until it got to our house (our route was the most convoluted thing I’ve ever seen; whoever coordinated it must’ve been a sadistic drunk). My brother and I took turns watching for that bus at the living room window every single morning. Conveniently, our vantage point meant we were staring directly into the sun, so during the winter, there were many times where I thought I saw the bus, but I wasn’t 100% sure because I was completely snow blind. As a result, and due to my paranoid fear that we would miss the bus, my brother and I spent many winter mornings at the end of our long driveway, stamping our feet in frozen frustration while I alternately cursed our bus driver and cried over my frostbitten ears because I thought wearing a stocking cap would muss my mullet.

Our bus was always overpopulated, a 3-kids-to-a-seat, band-instruments-stuffed-everywhere plight I assumed affected everyone, until I rode my friend’s bus one day and saw maybe 10 kids, each enjoying their own expansive seat acreage. Confused, I asked her, “Where is everybody?” She looked back at me, equally confused, and responded, “What do you mean? This is everybody.”

The next day I marched up to our bus driver, a sullen woman with a too-tight perm and a permanent scowl who probably enjoyed foisting those stale popcorn balls on us every Halloween, pointed at the maximum capacity sign that said “68 occupants,” and angrily asserted that there were at least 80 of us on the bus, and that was ridiculous. For my Norma Rae-esque efforts I got yelled at to sit down, and on my huffy way back to my seat (an overturned garbage can that some of the boys had thoughtfully turned into a bench seat for me by covering it with a two by four) I hollered, “I’d love to sit down, only THERE IS NOWHERE TO DO THAT BECAUSE THIS BUS SUCKS!”

What’s your least-favorite memory of riding the school bus?

A few years ago, Jason tasked me at the last minute with the job of getting a birthday card for his grandpa. My route to work is all freeway for the most part, so my only real option at the time was a gas station. I stopped in and found my choices limited – severely. Running out of time, I desperately chose the best of the worst. When I showed it to Jason, he was confused. “What…is this?”

“It’s a birthday card,” I said.

“No. No, it’s not.”

“But it was really my only option! It was either that or a fuzzy puppy nuzzling a baby duck.”

“This card sucks.”

So after that discussion (which consisted of a lot more about my inability to pick nice cards and my rebuttal that the choices were NOT SO GREAT TO BEGIN WITH), I went back and bought the rest of those cards in stock.

For the last two years, Jason has gotten this as his birthday card:

(I don’t even know what the inside reads anymore. Something about “Hope your birthday’s electric!” or something equally bad.)

And then, when I was cleaning out the Cavalier for the final time, I found one more of those delightful gems in the glovebox. So guess what Jason’s getting this year for his birthday?

Happy birthday, baby! I love you. And don’t worry, this is the last of the cards.

As far as you know…

I am still figuring out the idiosyncrasies of my car. The first day, I turned on the back windshield wiper, thinking, “Cool! I have never had a rear windshield wiper before. This is delightful.” Then I spent the next 15 minutes trying to figure out how to turn it off. After 10 miles of listening to “SCREEEEEEE SCREEEEEEE SCREEEEE” as the wiper scraped across my dry windshield, I finally had to pull into a gas station and consult the owner’s manual.

The blind spots are completely different in this car, too. The seat headrests are abnormally tall, so even if I crane my head all the way around, it still leaves a decent chunk of space where I cannot see if someone is about to plow into me. I’m terrified I’m going to change lanes, get hit by someone, and total my car all before the first payment is due.

And, the key fob has lock/unlock buttons on it, but they only work sporadically. When I met the lovely Emily last weekend for pancakes, she got to witness my ineptitude as I tried to leave and instead of unlocking the doors, the car just kept beeping at me. If she hadn’t seen me pull up in the car, it would’ve appeared that the car was not mine and that I was insane.

In other news, we have two identical, giant spiders building webs in our backyard, one hidden behind the garage, and the other blatantly positioned so that every time I go outside with Shorty, I forget all about it and obliterate its web with my head. The spider is very large and reddish and horrifying, with spiky appendages on its legs and a large body probably filled with venom, and no amount of Googling (omg, I cannot unsee the spider bite photos!) has led to its classification, so of course I am assuming it is some new, poisonous species that is plotting my death, and every time I destroy its carefully designed web with my careless meandering, it gets angrier and angrier and makes architectural adjustments so that when I walk into its web for the 15th time, I won’t be able to escape and the spider can then eat me at its leisure.

We are going to the State Fair this weekend, and I want to try a new food item this year, so my first choice was the Chicken-Fried Bacon, but then I realized it’s going to be 90 degrees, and deep-fried food with gravy + high heat and humidity = probably not too good. So we’ll see. Otherwise, the grilled marshamallow, chocolate and banana sandwich sounds good. Or the Camel on a Stick. (Seriously.) Also, if there’s not too big of a line, I totally plan on avenging last year’s sports anchor performance by talking faster and shedding my Minnesotan accent.

What are you doing this weekend?