Entries by Jane

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This website seems to have become an entire summer of Weekend Updates followed by Take No Prisoners, with nothing in between.  Wait no, not nothing.  Just a lot of living, and some of it can't be spoken of here for awhile.  I'll come back to it.  I promise.

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Last night, Jim said to me "Your weekends . . ." and then just shook his head.  He'd made that mistake, the one where you ask me what my plans are.  Silly kids.  There are 9 different plans, with 12 different possible wrenches in those plans.  This weekend is more of the same.  There is one plan that I'm hoping to make work, and that's the one where I get to feast with BLC and Amy.

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Despite contrary rumors you may have read on Twitter, I did not cause any of Jack Roush's plane crashes.  To the best of my knowledge, I haven't caused ANY plane crashes.  Yet.

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I will be in East Lansing and Ann Arbor, MI near the end of September.  Frenemies in those areas, please let me know if you'd like to hook up.  And I mean that in the "you bring me Blenheim's Ginger Ale and I put your picture on the internet" sort of way, not the Biblical sense.

My October is going to be wild and will involve a LOT of travel.  If you are in the Indianapolis IN, Grand Rapids MI, or Duluth MN areas and want to meet up, please let me know and I'll give you more details about the dates and reasons that I'll be in/near your fine cities.

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I can't stop watching this.  I've tried.  It just keeps playing and playing and playing.

I ganked that from somebody's Facebook wall.  I'd give credit but I think it was posted to every one of my classmates' walls at some point in the last week. 

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This week, years past:

2009:  I addressed some issues the internet was creating in my offline life.  A year later, I'm happy to report that I've solved those problems, with a combination of expecting better of people (giving more and getting more back, because that's how love works in the Church of Wags), Clowns In My Coffee and blissful ignorance.  I've never been more surrounded by love and peace.

2008:  Hope.  It got audacious there for awhile.

2007:  I cleared out some bookmarks and waxed poetic about Super Dave.

2006:  I became the Rockefeller of pessimism and found a sock monkey dress.

2005:  Installed some software and officially converted this space to a blog, after years of posting one essay at a time, old school HTML style, and taking it down when the next one went up.  SinginInTheRain contributed some Accidental Haiku via email.

Last night, Dad and David took the pavement winged sprint car out for the first time in a couple of years.  It was a TV Race for the Must See Racing Xtreme Sprint Series, so if you're a Comcast Sports Net viewer, you may see it cross your screen at 4 am sometime in the  near future.

Dano and I thought we arrived late, but because the ambulance wasn't on site yet, the practice session that was supposed to begin at 3 didn't get started until 5 pm.  Our first two hours looked like this, queued up with nowhere to go:

The ambulance arrived and practice was under way.

One thing I love about the Hoosier Outlaw Sprint Series is that their initials are HOSS and I'm a fan of them on Facebook, so once every couple of weeks, I get an email that says, "Jane, you have a new message from HOSS."

How many of YOU get regular communication from Hoss, huh?

It became obvious very quickly that David's prediction of a sub-10 second lap on the quarter mile track would be coming true, and it did.  During qualifying, three cars got under the 10 second lap officially, one unofficially (Jason Cox bobbled on his 2nd lap and ran a 3rd unofficial lap that was under 10 seconds, but didn't count for anything but pride).

I hereby declare that I will no longer be referring to a racer's "game face" or "race face".  It is now officially known as the Ray Face.  The kid means business, yo.  He may put his pants on one leg at a time like the rest of us, but once his pants are on, he wins races.

Here is proof that Dano is some sort of ethereal extraterrestrial entity.  Or his head, burdened by being known only for that hair, has decided to emit light to attract attention.

One of the other divisions on the card was the mini cup cars, which are tiny tiny little NASCAR looking things where the driver crawls in a hatch on the roof.  They are tiny.  And walking around them always makes me feel like I'm totally high and have turned into a giant.  They also make the track look like a real superspeedway (a name that I reserve for 2+ mile tracks but Slinger uses to describe its 1/4 mile).

David started 12th in the A main and finished 7th after 60 quick quick laps.

Wags came up for the race and quickly joined the cult of people wearing this exact same shirt.

My real camera battery died and the last half of my night was taken with LLoyd the Droid.  Not obvious at all, huh?

One picture that I didn't get but wish I had is with reader/commenter Scott, who was there to announce the night, and gave me a couple of shout-outs on the PA, which cracked me up like crazy (and made the people sitting next to us in the stands give me the wary "who is THAT" stare).

Had a great time and can't wait to knock some more dust off of that sprint car wing!

Next best thing to making it to the NYT bestseller's list myself?  Oh, probably THIS:

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It is a week of highs and lows for us.  I spent Tuesday afternoon at the doctor's office again and I'm pretty bummed about my brain right now.  It's there, don't worry.  It didn't go missing.  It's just not working right again, but I'm working on it.

Wrecks is also bummed.  He got to spend a week with some other dogs and now life is back to normal, but he far preferred being the little guy in the big pack.  I've never seen him quite as heartbroken as last night, when he realized what was going on, and ran from room to room searching for his pals, howl-sobbing, before finally collapsing into my lap with a sigh filled with longing and confusion.

That paragraph broke your heart, didn't it?  If yes, please consider donating to my Buy Wrecks a Pet Monkey fund.  I'm not sure I have the energy to deal with another dog full-time, but if I had a tiny monkey and a saddle, I'm pretty sure this blog would turn a profit in no time, and then I can afford to put Wrecks in therapy.

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I was watching a movie last night that had a boat in it, and as has been happening often lately, I got hit with a long-dormant memory.  This one was a series of books that I read as a tween, about a group of children abandoned by their mother who strike out to find their grandmother.  The oldest is a girl who ends up restoring and building boats to support them.  There is a boy with a reading issue.  A stranger they trust who robs them.  Eventually they find the grandmother, who is slow to warm to them.  The mother dies and is cremated and the boatbuilder builds a box to hold her ashes. 

No matter what I google, I can't come up with a title or author.  It's killing me.

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Late last night, I got an email from Google that I've been granted access to the Android App Inventor beta.  I will soon be building my own Android apps in their WYSIWYG environment, limited to no coding.  Hello world.

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Wrecks and I will be at Slinger Super Speedway in Slinger, WI on Saturday night for the winged sprint car race there.  Dad and David are taking the pavement sprint car, Dano is going to be slinging wrenches and splashing fuel (and probably dropping hints about the 9th car on Mom's 2011 Chili Bowl team, I'm guessing), and it's going to be a blast.  Looking forward to catching up with Scott there and seeing what I believe is my first winged pavement sprint car race.  Dad will have to correct me if I'm wrong on that.

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This week, years past:

2009:  Beer started following me on Twitter

2008:  Mo and I ask some hypothetical rhetorical questions

2007:  Lydia came to visit!

2006:  The most popular post in the history of this website - Where Have You Gone, Doug Wolfgang? - was published.  It has a dead image and some dead links now and definitely needs to be updated, seeing how I still get dozens of google hits daily on that post.

I am going to apologize for the language in this post ahead of time.  I wish I could tell this story without so many of the curses, but I just can't.

So a couple of weekends ago, I got a message on the online dating site OKcupid at around noon, from a guy who was offended that I had not responded to his message from 7 o'clock that morning.  He told me that I'm 29 years-old, OKcupid is a place to talk to people, not a place to ignore people, and that I should start acting my age.  He wrapped it up by calling me an "ugly muff-diving cunt" and telling me to change my profile from "bisexual" to "gay" because obviously I don't really want a man, seeing as how I didn't respond to him, a man.

Obviously, this was not something I took badly - I laughed, blocked him, and "ugly muff-diving cunt" became a bit of a term of endearment amongst my friends to whom I told this story.  Because nothing really better exemplifies the absurdities that one can run across in dating, on the internet or not, than somebody flipping their lid over a four hour delay in responding to a message.

On Monday of this week, I stumbled across a car that fit almost every single requirement I had of a car, which is pretty hard to do.  I made an appointment for a test drive on Tuesday night, and minutes before I walked out the door on Tuesday, I got an OKcupid instant message from a different guy.  I told him that I didn't have time to chat as I was going to test drive my potential new car.  He responded with "Oh!  I'm a car salesman!  Let me sell you a car." 

I groaned in my head, but said, okay, see what you can come up with for X, Y, and Z models (all of the same make, the ONLY brand I was shopping for), with L, M, N, O, and P features.  He responded back with, "You don't really want any of those.  You need a Jetta."  I responded with "Dude, if I just walked onto your lot and told you what I wanted, and you said ANYTHING pertaining to ANY other kind of car, I would turn around and walk away."  He again continued to extol the virtues of the Jetta, and I finally said "Have you ever lost a car sale and a date at the same time?  Big day for you."

Some of you may be familiar with my history of naming my vehicles, my trucks Butch and Gina (long i), my love of lady parts euphemisms, and my friends and coworkers who love to comment on the stereotypes associated with a girl who drives a full size truck.  Well, I tell all of these fun stories as a means of introducing you to the new love of my life, which I purchased without the assistance or opinions of boys, and which is most definitely not a Jetta. 

I present Muffy:

Muffy, the only car on the planet more stereotyped than my trucks.

Muffy is a Subaru Forester 2.5XT, so that cute little hood scoop there is signifying the presence of a turbocharger.  Muffy will take me from 0 to 60 in 5.3 and will eat up a quarter mile in 13.8 seconds.  At high speeds and sharp accelerations, her engine sings a sweet little melody to me, and the AWD cornering is a new and truly beautiful experience.  There are other wonderful traits in her corner, her leather interior, premium sound, massive amounts of space, and ridiculously low odometer.  But every time I start thinking about those things, the light turns green, and I remember what the XT stands for all over again. 

And no, she didn't come with a pride sticker.  I'll have to buy that myself.

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A note on the title of this post.  Pleiades is the constellation in the Subaru logo.  Pleiades were the "Seven Sisters" of Greek mythology.  From Wikipedia:  "After Atlas was forced to carry the heavens on his shoulders, Orion began to pursue all of the Pleiades, and Zeus transformed them first into doves, and then into stars to comfort their father. The constellation of Orion is said to still pursue them across the night sky."