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:

(more…)

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?

The Chevy Cav is gone.

It was time. For me to feel comfortable driving it this winter, I would’ve had to spend at least $750 on it, and I know it’s worth less than that. I was finally at the point where I was unwilling to put any more money into it.

So I’d been casually looking online for awhile and yesterday, I bought a new(er) car. I looked at cars.com on Wednesday, using my extremely limited search parameters (under 50,000 miles and $11,000 and sold by a dealer less than 20 miles from my house), scrolled through hundreds of listings that featured the same models (PT Cruisers, Aveos, Kia Rios) before I found my dream vehicle (a 2002 orange Saturn Vue with 44,000 miles for $7,991), and printed out the description and excitedly called Jason to tell him I found my car.

Then I sat back and began daydreaming about all the new adventures my Vue and I would have, like sitting in traffic during my commute, or it waiting for me in the parking lot while I attended Twins games, or me lovingly handwashing it every week, etc., etc. (There was sure to be a music montage in the background during these sequences.)

Then I pulled up the online description yesterday so I could once more gaze upon my dream vehicle, only to see a screen that said, “This listing has been removed.”

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.

I called the dealership, who informed me that yeah, that car was gone, but they had another one with 70,000 more miles for two thousand more dollars, was I interested? No, dudes. I wasn’t.

So, my Plan B was a kiwi green Ford Focus, which I was only mildly enthused about because while the Focus was one of the Cars I Was Willing To Drive, it wasn’t an orange Vue and would never be the orange Vue, and damn you person who bought the orange Vue!

I called to verify the Focus was still available and it was, and the sales guy also said he had a maroon one for $1,000 more but with 16,000 fewer miles and I could look at them both if I wanted. So I made the appointment for a test drive.

And the green one was nice. But the maroon one was nicer. It felt nicer, it rode nicer, and it already had license plates, so I wouldn’t have to spend the money on those like I would’ve for the green one. It had new tires, a new battery, new brake pads, and a new alternator. Plus, I was amazed at every little thing: the visors stayed up! The glovebox shut properly! All the windows went up and down! The A/C worked on every level instead of just on high! Random pieces of plastic weren’t floating around on the floor, their origin a mystery! It was so quiet in there! I could let go of the steering wheel without my car heaving itself to the left! This must be how rich people live!

And then after test driving the maroon one, the sales guy pressed a button on the key fob – and the car started from across the parking lot. It had an automatic starter.

I was already leaning toward the maroon car anyway, but as a person who hates winter in Minnesota, that pretty much sealed the deal.

After that it was a flurry of paperwork, and while waiting for the financing guy, I saw my Cavalier sitting outside. And I started to feel nostalgic for it. I bought that car in 1997 when I was fresh out of college. It was a former rental car and had 33,000 miles on it. I remember thinking at the time that the car payment ($225) seemed ridiculous.

Sure, now the car was creaky and slowly falling apart, and the window motors burned out with alarming regularity, and the leaky rear struts made my commute feel like I was riding in a haywagon over pointy boulders, but overall it had been good to me. Didn’t it deserve to achieve its dream of making it to 200,000 miles? (Never mind the fact that it took two tries for the engine to turn over when we left the house to come to the dealership.)

And right then, the dealer came back with my trade-in offer: “I’ll give you $100 for it.”

Apparently not.

As I emptied out the Cav and cleaned out the glovebox (after having to wrench it open and watching the door latch fling itself somewhere under the passenger seat), I took one last look at my car, the car that was with me through so much, the car that had served me so well that the dealer was absolutely flabbergasted it had made it to 192,000 miles.

“Thanks, Cav,” I said. “Thanks for everything.”

And then I drove home in this:

It’ll have some big brake pads to fill.