minivan mayhem

Due to an incident a few weeks back involving a parking lot and some ice, my little Sentra is in the body shop. My insurance company does provide a rental car, and I somehow got this sweet ride of a Mini Van. I have been driving this monster around all week, struggling to park and loving every minute of it for this simple and sad reason. It has a CD player and a TAPE DECK!

There were three tapes I remember from the 5th to 6th grade time range in my life that I just could not get enough of:

Tears for Fear (the Infamous tale of this tape still lives in Baldwin folklore, and would need its own entry!)
Culture Club
The Jets

Well, at this time, only the The Jets is available to me, I somehow uncovered it when I moved last June. I cannot even believe how strange it is that every single cheesy lyric has come right back to me. It is like no time has passed at all. Driving around in that Mini Van, singing my heart out to this tape just takes me right back to 6th grade. Like it was yesterday my parents took Teri and I to the State Fair to hear them play live, and I was bitter for a few hours because she caught one of their guitar picks and I didn’t! Those were simpler times and life was really, really good. Dark times were ahead, but I didn’t even know it at the time!

At any rate, my week of cruising around in a Soccer Moms dream is over, and the Van is going back tonight. I won’t miss parking it one bit, but I will miss the revisit to 6th grade!

get loud, be proud....have a mint!

Tonight the Jazz beat the Timberwolves while Matt and I beat the mint record. New record: 16!!

This is an obscene amount of mints. I know this, and have decided that the record will stand here, and the madness will stop.

We have been able to share the minty goodness around town. We gave out mints at a funeral, at church, and the latest batch will go along with someone's birthday present. So, it clearly has not been a waste.

christmas is officially over...

So, on Saturday, the 5th of January...that lovely furry creature I share my home with decided that it was too late in the year for me to still have my Christmas tree up, and did what he had been threatening to do all season. That's right. It started with him standing on his hind feet, and batting at an ornament....nothing I hadn't seen every day. Then, he made one quick leap up into the tree, and the next thing he knew he was crawling out from under it. After that, all ornaments were fair game, and easily accessible to his greedy and hurtful paws.

So...that is what it feels like!

Up until tonight, the Jazz have never lost a home game that I attended. I was on a really good streak, they had lost two games, but I had mysteriously not been there those nights.

Tonight that all ended. I finally got to feel what it felt like to walk away in shame...no mint, no promise of a free Big Mac. Nothing. Just Derek Fisher telling us to drive home safely on the jumbo tron. Which, by the way, I think happens every night, it is just that people are usually cheering enough that I haven't heard it.

At least it was the Mavericks that dealt the blow. I am actually a huge Nowitzki fan, and I am not ashamed to admit it! However, I was probably the only one that felt that way. That was one rabid, angry crowd. At the end, one guy, who felt he was a spokesman or the entire state of Utah, so eloquently summed up what the majority of the crowd was feeling by yelling, "Enjoy the gift Nowitzki....you piece of shit!"

Mint record still stands at 14.