Honk if you love these sandals

I honked my horn yesterday. At another driver. Who came very close to sideswiping me during an unsafe lane change.

I'll have you know that in 12 years of driving I have never honked my horn in a near-accident type situation. I am generally more concerned with getting out of the bad driver's way than getting my hand on the horn to express my displeasure in the offending car.

So this car merges onto the freeway (I very nearly typed "logged on" to the freeway. Good GRIEF.) and proceeds to sail across several lanes in one fell swoop. The swoop stopped at my lane, where I suppose I was in her blind spot, that is until I swerved, braked and honked. That was it. No big road rage thing. No close calls (not really), no slamming to a screeching halt, no spinning out of control. Just your standard overly eager lane changer nearly side swiping another car situation.

It's strange that I honked though. I don't think I felt particularly angry. I think it really was a "hey what are you doing? I'm in this lane" honk.

Hmm. I'm a honker now. I didn't think I had it in me - maneuver safely out of the way AND have the presence of mind to honk at an appropriate time? Huh.

In other news. I would love a pair of these sandals. Input?

In still other news, for the first time since... COLLEGE?!? I bought a pair of non-maternity jeans. I invested in three pairs of lovely, long GAP jeans and have worn two of them into shreds. Quite literally. The last pair is getting quite a work out. I hate shopping for pants. Fortunately I found a suitable pair of Levis at Kohls - on sale, even!

All the Easter candy I've been eating has effectively silenced my immune system and landed me a sore throat. I need to get to sleep, ASAP.

Wieners!

Guess what folks? My brother's a WIENER! (OK, fine. Winner.) TAB and the team went home with the Organizer's Choice award which means they were generally all-around AWESOME and I think they even scored $500. In nickels, of course. And a rusty old trophy made from car parts.

Despite having a giant wiener flopping around (ok, it was actually pretty hard [you can only imagine how stimulating it was to talk about the car all weekend]) on the roof, the car placed 56th out of 147. Not bad at all! They got only two black flags (MUCH improved over the last race, which was everyone's first time) and sang their way (Oh I wish I were a Nascar Mayer Wiener....) out of one penalty.

Press coverage (kinda) of the team and their Wienermobile!

REAL press coverage!

Perhaps most notable of all is that they raise money for non-profit organizations each time they race. This time they raced for Anastasis Ballet.

Go, Bandits, GO!

(To all Lent police, I realize I linked to two Facebook pages. I thought an exception could be made in this case.)

 

Dashing

The feature I most love about my '93 minivan is the dashboard design. Why don't they make cars and vans with dashboards parallel to the ground any more? It's so flat and stable and there's even a little lip to better hold things like my mug of tea or sunglasses or hand lotion or spare change or anything else I need to put down somewhere other than the floor. Bring back the dashboard shelf! Function is beautiful, after all.

Choices

"When your vehicle gets to a certain age you have to make the choice between money and your life."

- Tommy Magliozzi

Vaaaaanderful.

This post is about my minivan. Amanda is not alone.

For those of you who are familiar with my mother's side of the family... that's where we got it. It is not without it's quirks as is typical of most cars with that kind of history. We've had it for quite a while now (since September) but I've become its primary driver only recently. Believe it or not I wanted to drive it sooner, but Superman wouldn't let me. I love the sliding door - much easier to wrestle a small, heavy and wiggly child in and out of her car seat without having to worry about the car door bashing the side of the car parked next to us or closing on my legs.

However, Superman deemed it a work vehicle and and not a baby vehicle and so he drove it back and forth until he was laid off. Before he went off to the academy he made sure it got new tires (chunks of the old ones were falling off - slight problem there...) and an alignment and also had the wheel bearings re-packed. The difference in the ride is amazing. It doesn't feel like it's about to fall apart any second! He takes the xB to the academy because any vehicle in their lot must be in complete compliance with vehicle code and the van has a cracked tail light cover.

My only serious complaint about the van is that the headlights are absolutely no good at all. This is fine during the day but the two times per week I have to drive in the dark to work (recently in fog and/or rain) this is definitely NOT fine. You know it's bad when you have to catch up to some other brightly-shining vehicle in order to feel safe on the freeway. I can see far enough ahead of me to drive on (well lit!) city streets but not on the freeway.

Of course the transmission is old and tired and the cold weather has made things worse. I unthinkingly threw the van into drive only 30 seconds after starting it the other day and nearly jumped out of my skin in response to the loud KA-THUNK that shuddered up through the floorboards as a result. I am now far more respectful and allow a warm up period of at least three minutes.

One particularly baffling quirk of this vehicle is the weather stripping that surrounds the windshield. Take a closer look:

Yes, the weather stripping takes a detour into the space around the door and helps out the weather stripping there, too. Inexplicably, neither the windshield nor the door has ever leaked. Strange, no? Makes me wonder how the weather stripping got off track to begin with. I'm afraid to mess with the system because I fear it would start to leak if I did.