Monthly Archives: October 2011

If you leave me alone in the car…

If you leave me alone in the car…

I will be forced to find ways to amuse myself.

Fortunately, I am easily amused. Especially with my new phone and its awesome apps.

So, last week, Jared had to get his motorcycle appraised to see if it was totaled. But he had to drive it there. After I helped him with getting it on the borrowed trailer, a neighbor walked by.

This particular neighbor is a really nice, older guy, but when he stops by to chat, you plan on it being for awhile. So I sat in the truck and waited. And waited. And waited some more.

And then I got out my phone and played with my photo apps some more.

The famous taking a picture of yourself taking a picture. But with the TRUCK mirror!

With another one of those fun “Paper Camera” modes for the photos. 🙂

Huzzah for the simple joys of life. That now involve a highly technical cell phone and fun applications on it.

 

(And by the way, if you were curious about the outcome of the bike, it’s officially totaled. You might have heard “Taps” playing softly in the distance, mixed with Jared’s sighs.)

Cold Front!

Cold Front!

I wore a jacket today.

Normally, because I hate cold weather, this would be bad news. But I can’t remember the last time we were in 50 degree weather. February? March?

It only took until October, but I finally feel like we’ve got ourselves some appropriate fall weather. And back in my home state, fall was my favorite season because of how the trees would turn colors, particularly in the mountains.

Observe:

Look at that beautiful mountain and the leaves changing colors into golds and oranges….

A younger, more naive me… in a JACKET!

What’s not to love about that sort of scenery? The colors, the rock formations and shapes, the crisp mountain air…

So, what I’m trying to say is that change, especially from hot weather to moderately cold cold weather, is good. Yay for jacket weather!

Mental Health day

Mental Health day

I didn’t go to work yesterday.

No, I didn’t just NOT show up. I took it off a week ago, anticipating that I might need a break. (And oh, did I need it, people. This was a moment of inspiration before disaster truly struck. I couldn’t have been more grateful that I had foresight to take that day off…)

A lot of people asked me if I had any plans for my day off.

The beauty of it all was no, I didn’t. If yesterday had a theme song, it would be Bruno Mars’s “The Lazy Song”. Absolutely yes.

Now, to be clear, I did do a few responsible things. I made meals (breakfasts, lunches, and dinners). I did a deep clean of the kitchen, unloaded the dishwasher and ran it. (Twice, actually. Dishes got a little backed up due to some of the craziness of work which will not be mentioned in this post or on this blog.) I did lots of laundry, which included changing the sheets on our beds to our “cooler weather” sheets (the high for today didn’t get past eighty-five. THAT IS TWENTY DEGREES LESS THAN WHAT WE HAD ALL SUMMER, PEOPLE! So yes, “cooler weather” sheets, not our “cold weather” sheets.

I even went grocery shopping. I hate grocery shopping, but I did it on my mental health day. BECAUSE IT WAS BETTER THAN THE REST OF MY WEEK. Seriously (and sadly) true.

But, overall, I was fairly lazy. I slept in. I gave myself a three day weekend. I was fairly useless.

And it was marvelous.

The moral of the story is: I need to do this mental-health-day-for-no-good-reason-thing more often!

Death Wish?

Death Wish?

Jared swears he doesn’t have a death wish. But I have to disagree. I haven’t been able to figure it out, but I think there’s something genetically ingrained within him that is addicted to adrenaline rushes.

Case in point: In the last post, it was mentioned we traveled afar to go pick up a trailer so Jared could fit four motorcycles on it (for him and three friends) and go to a track day. Anyways, because it was through a certain “program” and there were instructors, Jared could learn valuable skills that could translate not ONLY on a racing track, but on the every-day roads and commuting as well. And since this was for “educational purposes”, I as a teacher should value hands-on practice. (Essentially, he really did say that. I bet you could feel my eyes rolling through this paragraph…)

So, he left me alone last Friday evening to go be an adrenaline junkie with some other adrenaline junkie monkeys, and didn’t return to me until very late on Saturday.

Now, if you talked to him, you would hear him recall the track day like this:

Yes. This is really my husband hanging off his bike in true racing form. But remember,  it wasn’t racing, it was practicing and purely educational, for reals.

But let me show you what happened in the World of Actuality.


 Surprisingly, no Jareds were injured in the low-siding of this vehicle.

Despite all the precautions Jared took, and his great form, for no clear reason, near the end of the day his bike had a nasty low-side/slide (better than a high-side, but still).

To sum it all up into one word: Yup.

There you have it. I am happy to say that Jared is fine, but even though he claims not to have made any head-to-ground contact (and the lack of scraps on his helmet supports this observation), I think he might have jarred his brain just a bit because even though his bike is looking pretty trashed, he is considering fixing it up and continuing to ride it.

However, despite any emotions you might be reading into at a deeper level of this post, I would like to make it clear that I only dislike this sort of thing so much because I DO want to keep him around for a long time! I really do love this man, but his nearly physical desire to put himself into danger without it needing to happen occasionally baffles me.

A mini-adventure.

A mini-adventure.

Jared is loaning a long flatbed trailer from somebody who works at his work. This normally wouldn’t really matter to me, but 1) He’s using the trailer to tow his bike and some other people’s to a track day next week, and 2) The people live over a hour away and we had to take a lot of back roads to get there.

But it was not as bad as it could have been, because even in the most miserable situations, you can find something fun and quirky. Like an ostrich farm.

Seriously. I have photograph evidence, taken with my phone.

I promise, it looks so much cooler in real life. They are pretty impressively sized birds.

But why would anyone have an Ostrich Farm in TEXAS? What could you possibly do with that? Make really big exotic omelets? I don’t know.

Also, look at the sky.

Also more awesome in real life. In the past several months, we have had 3 days of rain, mainly yesterday and today. And it has been glorious. I don’t want it to stop!

Unfortunately, rain + a massive trailer = interesting driving conditions. Since I would rather have the rain anyways, I think it would have been much better to drive in the rain but not have the trailer for the motorcycle stuff, but for some reason, Jared thought it would be worth it. At least nobody was hurt, this time.