Texas Blue Lime Productions

So today, I’m running some errands when I get pulled over by a cop. Since I was sitting at a red light, I couldn’t imagine why. I looked in the bottom corner of my windshield and I knew. DAMMIT.

Emil and I never miss inspection or registration. We are so careful since it’s so easy/cheap. I mentioned that we always get a reminder. The officer was quick to alert me that we don’t get reminders for inspections, only registration.

:: sigh ::

He was nice. I was wrong. So, don’t read too much into this next part.

When I asked him how much these tickets run, he had no clue. He told me to call the number on the back.[1] What? Have you been watching gas prices or the news? Do you know the current price of staple items like cheese? You are giving a ticket for something so very minor and you don’t even know how much it is? Turns out: $140-170! Are you kidding me? ~$150 for a $15 inspection? Now, again, I know that I was in the wrong and deserve the ticket. I just don’t see that the punishment is just.

At the same time, I hope that when I read the police blotter for the day that Bryan was 100% crime free, today. I’d hate to learn that he could have prevented “real” crime if he’d not been concerned with a single digit number on a sticker on my truck.

Poor Baby Truck!

[1] When I did call the number on the back, I got stuck in an infinite loop in Call Processing Hell and couldn’t get a human who could answer questions.

No Comments »

Emil is in the Northgate Dart League. I’m an unofficial alternate only because having a warm body is better than being short a team member. So, every Wednesday night from we are at Fitzwilly’s or Dudley’s. We have wings and beer. I either play with the guys or work on stuff for As You Wish. It’s a nice environment for getting things done.

This week, I had errands and meetings so I met Emil there. After pulling out of my parallel parking spot, I was getting ready to merge one lane to the left when I saw a much-bigger-than-Baby-Truck coming at me from the left. The guy was leaving the campus dorms, headed for the far right lane/exit. I slammed on my brakes and laid on the horn, but he still hit me. :: sigh ::

We are all fine. It it was a minor fender-bender. His back passenger door is bashed in and there are scrapes down the side. My driver fender is messed up and the metal pops when I open the door. I called Emil who looped around and came back to facilitate the exchnage of information.  The guy and his friend could not have been nicer. When it’s this minor and handled this politely, it’s just an inconvenience.

So, poor Baby Truck has a boo-boo in addition to slutty tires.

No Comments »

I have lost track of how many tires we have repaired or replaced on Baby Truck.  Once there were even so many repairs in the same tire, that we expired the warranty early. I even had two flats at once back in April.

It’s interesting because I drive ~all the same places Emil does and he rarely has flats. We buy good tires for the truck, so what is the difference?

So, last week, when I noticed a slow leak in a tire, I kept an eye on it. We filled up the tire and saw it a little low again a few days later.

We decided that Baby Truck’s tires are slutty:
they pick up everything and like to get nailed.

Saturday, we took Baby Truck to Sam’s only to learn that the nail (again???) was in the side and could not be repaired. We had a little bit of warranty left on the tire, but it was little enough that we decided, instead, to try Fix-a-Flat. We chose poorly. About 20 hours after putting it in, I pulled into our driveway for lunch only to hear a loud hissing sound when I got out. Air was leaving the tire so fast that I could see the truck sinking.

Thanks to Emil taking a very long lunch, buying a new jack (we’ve done this so many times that my jack is worn out), and delivering the rim to Discount tire, it is fixed.

On the way home from picking up the tire, we also saw two “superheros” dressed in all black, capes included, standing on the side of Texas Avenue facing the northbound traffic each with one hand on a hip and one fist in the air like they were about to take off. I Twittered this and got several requests for pictures, but I had to explain to everyone that Emil wouldn’t drive around the block so we could pass them again. It certainly was an odd site, however.

No Comments »

When I attended the University of Miami, there were always wonderful animals in our campus lake (which was formed via the canals to the bay, so the water is brackish). After Hurricane Andrew, we had a resident pelican who stuck around for ~3 semesters before he presumably headed back to the beach. Manatees used to migrate into and of the lake with the (ahem) change of seasons. Occasionally, there would be a crocodile or an alligator and we’d get all these warnings to leave the critter alone and not to feed it.

This week brings sad news from the campus. The current-resident endangered crocodile was killed.

There is a special place in hell for people who do things like this.

No Comments »

Thanks to Lani of Agent Genius, I saw this graph.

I work to find the middle of this graph all the time!

No Comments »

Voter Map for 77807

No Comments »

Thanks to TechCrunch for this humorous look at the banking economy.

Basketball fans who’ve been watching the bank failures and consolidations recently will understand and appreciate this September Madness chart.

This is so sad.

No Comments »

more cat pictures

One of my mom’s favorite stories about me: I was probably almost a year old and had learned to climb. Mom left me alone with Daddy so she could run an errand. She included a warning something like, “if she’s quiet, something is wrong.”

I helped myself up to the tank on the toilet and snagged a box of Kleenex.

Mom came home to find me saddled under Daddy’s arm, and him picking up the entire box of kleenex off the floor and stuffing them back in the box, one by one. Apparently, I thought it was funny toss them up in the air and watch them float to the floor.

No Comments »

more animals

No Comments »

Quick, someone tell Grammar Girl!

Our local TV station ran a quick story about a shooting in College Station. Unfortunately, their mis-use of quotation marks around the word accidental implies that there is more to the story—that perhaps the shooting was intentional or made to look like an accident.

Shame on you, KBTX! Unless you have factual reason to believe that this shooting was intentional, you have no right to tarnish this man’s reputation with your implications. He is most certainly in a living hell right now. Why would you allow a punctuation error to make it worse?

Punctuation matters!

No Comments »