Stupid little things that make me happy…

1) Jef fuh fuh Dun Ham (.com) – and his T-shirts. Just walking through the living room where the DVD Arguing With Myself is sitting, seeing the cover, makes me giggle a little at the memory of watching it. And watching it again. And again. Mostly fun to watch it with at least one person seeing it for the first time.

2) Goofy little Cracker Barrel teddy bears dressed like vampires. You see, people from Louisville can’t cross running water – ala The Ohio River – and that’s why all the Kentucky license plates disappeared as soon as we “accidentally” crossed into Indiana. It was just one of those stir-crazy, we’ve all been in this car together too long so it’s funny jokes. I tend to look for state or city bears when I visit a new place and couldn’t find a Louisville bear in our one stop (Cracker Barrel), but sis finds a little halloween bear dressed as a vampire. Considering the earlier joke, it’ll be a perfect reminder of the crazy trip.

3) The discovery of PyroNovelties.com – even though they no longer sell the same cool fireworks hat we saw. Another stir-crazy car ride joke was that we should have named ourselves ACME Pyro so our business cards could have all said we were super-geniuses. The Wile E. Coyote T-shirts on here tells me other pyro folks have made this joke. There must be a lot of tired people in the pyro business.

4) Raffle Tickets for cars — or at least fantasizing on a long drive about winning because the odds are so much better than the lottery. Especially fun are the “design your own” raffles, as JamesT and I argue about ordinary car colors and what interiors look good, and the value of coupes versus convertibles, and how we couldn’t afford to keep the car since having to take a loan out for 25% of the value just to pay the taxes would be the equivalent of just a car payment for a new car in the price range we were already shopping — then there’s the full value consideration for the insurance we’d have to pay, and the fact it’s just a two-seater, and the terrible gas mileage, and what would we do with a car that was pretty but we couldn’t afford to drive — which turns into how we turn around and sell it for a new car we CAN afford outright, or else take the money and pay off credit cards so we can keep our crappy cars until such time as we HAVE to have a new one and can then just afford a payment like normal people… and all the while I struggle with whether it would kill my dream to win a Corvette, only to trade it for something practical. And then if we just consider how much these raffle tickets costs, and what else we could just GET for that money rather than flushing the money away on a raffle — even if the money goes to support the museum. I still can’t wrap my head around it, and I only have through tomorrow to decide on whether to blow the dough on a 1 in 500 chance.

AND (oh yeah!)
5) Getting to cut my work trip short because I have work! Mule Day is Sept 26, which means setup will be on that Friday, which means we need to be there Thursday evening. Of course, it would work out to be the week of my next Illinois trip for NSC. Thus, after some conversation today, we easily agree on letting me cut a day off the trip so my “job” won’t interfere with my other “job”. Tee hee. Is that just funny to me? We’ve been laughingly calling the “Mule Day” event the “Running of the Mules” because they’ve never had fireworks before, and we’ll be setting them off a block or so away from where all the mules are penned for the parade the next morning. We’d been envisioning stampeding mules bursting through the fence, but only in jest. Turns out we got to a little dose of what could happen this weekend in our test shoot, as for the first time we set off some shots from sis’s side yard after the addition of a horse to the property, kept by her hubby’s brother at his adjacent property. Seems after the first boom, they went out to find the horse “leaping in circles” and trying to “turn toward the sound”. It never tried to run or get out of the pen, but it was clearly “excited” by the noise. And it was one horse… kept farther away than the mules will be… with someone there to try to talk and keep it calm. WHEE! AND we’re shooting off asphalt for the first time, too, and looking forward to “bouncing tubes in the racks”.