bella kept the first hat she ever knitted in her car. this was not for ornamental purposes like a graduation tassel but a functional part of her car's toolkit like an ice scraper or flashlight. being her first full project it had some pretty obvious flaws so she felt it didn't merit a routine rotation, nor was it worthy of proper donation. but it was perfect to help fight a morning chill until her ...

aleo just got his driver's permit and has begun learning to drive. as with bella he is learning on a manual and like bella i taught him how to do it when he was thirteen. this means his first time out instead of just teaching him how to drive a stick-shift we could get right into the rules of the road and other next-level skills.

i took him to the same place i took bella and where lots o ...

a new TROYSCRIPT was posted today. honesty, honestly

if i could have invented one thing made in the past few decades, it would be highway rumble strips. those things are the greatest. so simple. so clever. so effective. can you imagine how many lives they have saved? there is no way it is not in the millions, the tens of millions even.

if you think that number is high, i would guess you have never had your car drift off the pavement into the dirt/grass/stone/whatever at 60 miles per hour (or better). maybe you were just distracted or maybe you had just fallen asleep. either way you would be challenged as hell to recover from the moment because to keep a car on the predictable cement and off the crazily unpredictable terrain next to the cement is what it's all about. once you're in the dirt, life gets real unpredictable real fast (and that tenet applies to more than just driving). and someone figured out a crazy-simple and super-effective way to keep you on that smooth and comfy asphalt. and not only does it let the occupants of the offending car know to get re-focused, the noise made alerts cars around the car floating out of their lane to be on alert for the driver that is droswy, distracted or messing with their phone. great on so many levels.

as far as life-saving goes, that has to be right up there with the most note-worthy medical advances seen over time.

i tried to look up who invented them and closest i got (not that i looked long) is some guy says his grandfather made them, or at least made the machine that makes them. not that receiving credit gets you much, especially if there are no monetary spoils (or you're dead), but it surely would have been satisfying to have divined something that saved, and therefore changed, so, so many lives.

a new (and super-young) friend of mine recently convinced me to watch a fast and furious movie. she named it one of her best guilty pleasures.

one night when i had some free time i watched the first show in the series.

less than two hours after that, got a speeding ticket while running an errand.

and i wasn't going just a tad over the speed limit. i might have been going quite a bit over the speed limit.

my friend laughed when i told her this happened. i asked her if there was some sort of "fast-and-furious" related defense available to me. she said i might be able to get the judge to see the humor in the series of events and take mercy on me in that regard.

i doubt marty will be laughing when she learns of this. the reason i'm not certain is she is going to learn of this when she reads it here on the website. it's not that i was hiding the ticket from her, our conversations just never wended themselves that way.

bella just bought her first car.

where to begin?

i guess with the obvious. it is a 95 volvo sedan.

now for the less obvious. it is a 5-speed manual transmission. yes, bella can drive a stick. i taught her when she was thirteen. i taught alex when he turned thirteen too. and when anthony turns, thirteen, i will teach him as well.

i truly wanted a volvo wagon, ...

bella is sixteen. which means bella is driving. and not just driving but rockin' the driving. the above photo shows bella after her first wild drive which means her first driving out on the public roads and not in the large city park where she logged most of her early miles (the muny parking lot has probably taught more people to drive and park than any other blacktop within 500 miles).

...

we have had car trouble in our last two long-distance family vacations. the second instance left us stuck in sidney, nebraska for two days. technically we broke down on the highway twenty miles past sidney but it was the closest town with a aaa-recommended garage. as we were figuring out what to do, marty told me that there was a Cabelas there which is one of those big outdoor sporting stores like...

on the drive up to nebraska for the ms150 bike ride, the single comment i remember more than any other was, "dad. i think it might be time for a new car."

i blame the thirty degree temperature drop we experienced between our start and end point. well that and the fact that my car doesn't have air conditioning OR heat at the moment which meant early on we had to roll the windows down and c...

first off, sorry for dropping out like that. i do believe it is the first time i have dissapeared for that long, sans explanation in the fourteen year existence of this site, but, well, you know, life.

the lapse began after i had one of my most tumultuous weeks i can remember. there were dramatically high highs which the universe followed up with unexpectedly low lows. by week's end i was a bit of a spent mess. everything is back to great though. it just took a minute to let my mind cut it all down into consumable, bite-sized chunks. minutes up. chunks swallowed. moving forward. trending upward.

if you're wanting examples, i won't bore you with the lows, as who wants to document or read about those, but will share a sample high. on may 25 i drove bella across town to attend a roller-skating party. whenever bella wants to get somewhere on time she taps her time-obsessed father who attempts to respect other peoples' time as much as his own. when we pulled into the lot i commented on how empty it appeared. after checking the invite in her lap bella smiled at me uncomfortably and confessed that she may have gotten the time wrong and we were an hour early. now this may seem minor to some but sixty mid-day, beautiful-weathered weekend minutes to a guy who likes distance bike riding and reading on the porch is like four hours any other time of the week. no stranger to my ticks, my daughter knew this was no minor mis-read. i breathed deeply and circled us out of the barren lot at a clip a police car would have noticed. wanting to avoid the busy avenue that brought us here i turned us deeper into the neighborhoods and we unhurriedly glided our way through the tree-lined streets pointing out houses and yards we found interesting.

after passing a sprawling church complex i made a u-turn and pulled into its lot. i drove to the dead-center of the large, carless, blacktop and turned off the car.

BELLA
what are you doing?

TROY
you said you wanted to learn how to drive.

BELLA
what? like now?

TROY
yeah, why not do something worthwhile with this unexpected free-time.

BELLA
oh my god! oh my god! yes. ok.

i then taught my thirteen year old (just turned) how to drive a stick-shift ... in seven minutes. the brief experience, twenty minutes end to end, culminated with bella driving figure eights in a church parking lot. my 91 bmw softly and slowly sailing across the smooth pavement, windows down, sunroof open and the biggest smile possible stretched across my fearless daughter's sunlit face. after we traded seats and headed back to the skating rink i told her that she, at thirteen, could do what a great number of adults could not, and she should feel like a bad-ass because of it. her beaming face and quaking frame revealed that she did.

so these are the sorts of things (e.g. the highs at least) i'm experiencing and as long as i'm the one charged with both having and documenting the happenings, the math will quickly show there are just not enough hours in the day. but i don't want to become that guy who just appears every now and again, and only when it is convenient for him and never for you (e.g. like that fair-weather college pal who is only hangs out between love interests) so i've given some thought to how i can continue to nurture this website (and our relationship) and still lead my new hurly-burly life. here's what i've come up with. if you look in on monday and there is no posting, there will be no content all week. but if you look in on monday and there is a post, then there will be a post every day of the week. i think in a relationship like this there needs to be some sort of understood expectation.

of course the thought of just stopping rolls off my mind's ticker-tape machine every now again but for personal reasons i wish to continue recording my family's moments and i have learned this vehicle is an imperative part of that commitment. for those of you that enjoy reading along, you incent me to pull my act together. without you, it's a very hard affair so i appreciate your on-going participation more than you understand.

my two core objectives with this site are:
1. to continue chronicling the funny, sad, curious, and note-worthy moments that occur in my home full of children.
2. to see that what i document is thoughtful, edited, and not being done for the wrong reasons (which has surely happened from time to time in the past).

most important to me is that i don't create an expectation that forces me to produce content against a schedule i can't maintain, well at least maintain and try to keep the content on point and thoughtful. because i find when we let such standards go, pride in the product being produced is not far behind.

over the last few weeks i've taught alex how to work the stick shift in my car. so now when we we're driving, and he's next to me obviously, i'll hit the clutch and call out a gear, like second or third. alex then moves to action changing the stick accordingly and then acknowledges the change by repeating the gear i called for. i'm struck by the cleanliness and efficiency of our dance which has come about most naturally. we're already so good at it, we're able to insert the calls and responses right in the middle of conversations with only the slightest pause in thought or acceleration.

tuesday morning when i entered the garage to take the boys to school, they were both in the car and waiting for me. one of them had already hit the garage door opener and when i slid into my seat alex already had his hand on the stick ready to go. seeing this i cautioned him to be careful to not pull the stick out of gear when i wasn't in the seat (explaining it is possible to do when the clutch isn't engaged lest he thought otherwise). to his question of 'what would happen?' i explained if the car was parked on any sort of grade, it could start rolling forward or backward depending on the slope. fortunate to the moment, there is a slight grade out of our garage so i told him to go ahead and pull the car out of gear. he looked at me with uncertainty. i nodded and said it was ok. so he pulled it from first gear and the car started slowly rolling forward. alex looked up at me. i said if this ever happened when i wasn't here he needed to pull on the emergency brake and pointed it out. as we talked this through, the car's front end moved out of the garage and began rolling faster due to a steeper grade when exiting. i said, "alex pull the brake". more speed. some panic out of alex. more speed. "pull the brake!" panic. more speed. "pull the brake alex!" his hand reached for it, gripped the handle and lifted up with as much force as his slender arm and coursing adrenaline would allow. the car lurched to a stop in the middle of the alleyway and a few feet from the opposing curb. anthony looked up from his book with piqued eyes. alex looked at me with wide eyes. i held out my gimme five hand. after he slapped my hand i smiled big and complimented the successful handling of his first car emergency. he turned from me wearing that glow of earned pride so special to see in one's children.

wednesday morning when we met in the car for school, both boys asked if we could do that rolling thing again where we had to use the emergency brake. we did.

today will be one of the few days a year i spend shirtless in a speeding car headed from one region of this country to another region. many who hear of my plans express shock that i would choose a twelve hour drive over a three hour flight. there are many reasons for this choice none of which most would share but the biggest reason i still make the choice is that it is still a choice i am able to make. we are one national event/disaster from having highway travel be as impossible, frustrating and unusable as airline travel.

driving a non-air-conditioned sixteen-year old bmw by yourself, cross-country in august heat, windows down, sunroof open, shirt off, music distortedly loud, and shoeless on a day you'd typically be in the office is the closest glimpse of the fountain of youth i've ever spied. this was my day yesterday and it was exquisite. very, very exquisite.

it was two years ago to the weekend that i last made this pilgrimage south to visit my two best friends. this makes it also two years ago to the weekend that my colleague and friend, joe, died suddenly during a routine mountain-biking outing. joe floats in and out of my thoughts with whimsical unpredictability and did so with heightened frequency yesterday. sample: one day joe asked me to do lunch. when we sat down at a mediterranean eatery he expressed dissatisfaction with his work situation. actually, it was the very first thing he said which made the first thing i said this ... through my monologue, joe wordlessly stared at me like a university student taking in an advanced physics problem. when i finished he burst out laughing. after calming down he shook his still smiling head thoughtfully, picked up the menu in front of him and said, 'yes, we can eat'. he seemed better through the rest of lunch and work matters didn't come up again. after that initial session joe would appear at my desk once or twice a year saying "i need a pep talk' (what we came to call my dissertation) or sometimes it would be 'i really need a pep talk today troy' to which i'd say "you driving?".

i may not be the most conventional life coach out there, but unlike some, i don't get paid by the hour. things are what they are. if you like them, fight to keep them. if you hate them, fight to change them. life isn't forever, feel free to be picky.

the why the hell wouldn't ya guy told me a story about a friend of the family who was placed in an assisted living facility. for a long time he was perfectly ok with it because he was free to come and go as he pleased because he still had his car. as he got a little older and by some people's estimation a little less capable behind the wheel his children said he had to start thinking about giving up his car. his response was simple; if they took his car he was going to kill himself.

good to their word, they eventually took their father's car. when he learned of this he made his way to the second floor of the building he lived in, opened a window and stepped out of it. and, good to his word, died.

wouldn't you think the children of a man possessing this much conviction, would know the man possessed this much conviction?

saturday while pulling into a curbside parking spot i scraped the fender of the car parked in the space behind mine. in the end the damage was not bad. nothing on mine and a scrape to the rubber fender of a honda accord. it was very, very minor and i considered just leaving it. but decided if someone scraped my car i'd want to be the one who decided how bad it was and if it needed some sort of attention or not. so, on a scratch piece of cardboard, i wrote the following. i slid the torn cardboard under their driver side wiper and went in to get my haircut. while waiting, i had an uneasy feeling and couldn't get a co-worker's voice out of my head about 'never admitting' and 'never apologizing' when it comes to matters of auto accidents. i argued that in cases where there is obvious fault one can admit and one can apologize. he tells me to ask any insurance company and they'll make it very clear ... never admit and never apologize, just call them. not often looking to insurance companies for ethical advice, i decided the note was the right thing to do and i would work through whatever came of it and i went about my day.

a few hours and errands later my pager went off. i instantly knew it was marty and it occurred to me that i didn't think to call her about the mishap or the note (if only they made a device you could use to contact others while away from home). i feared the worst. "troy. some insane woman just called raving about her ruined car and said you did it. is this true! are you back on the pipe? we talked about this! come home! come home now!" but instead this is what my pager read. when i got home marty went into more detail about the lady's phone call and how she went on about how our communities needed more mutual respect and ownership and she was so very appreciative of the gesture. she also mentioned a need for penmanship because she could only decipher about half of what my note actually said.

so there evil insurance-abiding co-worker. it seems the world does not have to revolve around fear of litigation or bloated insurance premiums ... or legible writing as far as that goes.

wednesday night i drove a shiny new honda odyssey home. it started out with 5 miles on the odometer and ended up with 30 by the time i backed it into the garage. i know that the car is for marty and most would think that she would have been jonsin' to drive it but she was afraid of wrecking it pulling onto the busy road in front of the dealership and how sucky would that be. so i got the honors of driving my/marty's/our first brand new automobile off the lot.

now, how marty got this car is an interesting story. she researches everything to death and in her studies she learned of this technique of purchasing a car over the internet. she sent an email to every honda dealer within 100 miles and basically said, i'm buying a car, this car, this week and am looking for who will give me the best deal. she was worried that no one would respond for a number of unforeseen reasons. well she worried for naught because they not only responded but they were climbing over one another to get her in their showroom. one guy offered this. the next guy offered this plus this. they ratted one another out on available deals going on this month until one guy ultimately said, i'll beat any offer you get. well all right then.

now unfortunately our good fortune hit a wall. and that wall was we were looking to purchase the most sought after car of this type on the market. additionally it is year end so the deals were there. our ultimate challenge was finding someone who could keep a 2003 odyssey on their lot for more than three hours let alone finding a salesman who will come down on their price. so in the end we got partially screwed and had to buy one that was on a tractor trailer en route. when cars are selling in this manner, it's hard to get dealers to budge. why the hell would they. but this scenario aside, the internet deal has legs, as the motley fool claims, and if you're in the market, i'd recommend considering such a strategy in your process.

they officially totaled marty's car last week (bitch). we are both quite sad. it was a beautiful and beautifully preserved 92 bmw touring wagon that had a very particular single owner.

in discussing what to do next, we had multiple things to consider. when we bought the last car, we were a one baby family. marty was moving from a sporty two door and needed something, emotionally, not too far off the mark there.

but, in looking at both our present and future it's time we embrace some facts. we may not live in typical suburbia but we are a couple of thirty somethings with 2 kids, 2 kids from a woman who says she enjoyed both of her pregnancies. so with functionality in mind, it's time to suck the pipe and get the mini-van (gasp from audience and friends). we're eyeing a honda odyssey. if you gotta do the mini-van-thing there's no reason not to get the sexiest, most feature-filled and SAFEST one on the road.

marty's struggling. function over form. function over form. function over form is the phrase i keep repeating to her since the topic arose. that said, if you think there's any chance i won't present her with one of those six inch soccer ball decals for the back window, you don't know me very well.

marty was passing through an intersection yesterday when an suv running a red light t-boned her. the point of impact centered on the passenger side rear door and the collision sent marty's car into the neighboring lane where the car came to a slow stop.

no one was hurt. i can't even begin to tell you what kind of ziggurat needs to be erected to the germans for their automotive prowess. the center point of this collision was 15 inches away from 2 month old alex's head. he was pulled from his car seat unscathed, screaming his tiny, diapered ass off, but unscathed. it's friggen amazing. especially when you look at the car. the entire passenger side is a complete disaster with both doors having been pushed in about six inches.

when marty called me at work, and after confirming everyone was ok, i was ravenous for details. how fast were you going? 40mph. who was at fault? the other person. how's the car? bad shape. was it a man or a woman? woman. was she talking on a cellphone? uncertain but the car behind her said she was messing around with something. what did she say to you? nothing.

NOTHING?!? this was the response i wasn't prepared for. i asked marty for clarification.

t: do you mean she didn't say anything important or she really didn't say anything?

m: she didn't say anything. i never spoke to her. what did you want her to say?

t: how about i'm sorry. i'm sorry for being such a complete idiot and endangering you and your childrens' lives. i'm just sorry.

m: well maybe she was shook up too. i mean she probably recognizes what she did.

t: you see, by not apologizing i'd say she doesn't. i'd say she doesn't appreciate that she just made us a one car family for the next month. or that if they total the car, we're out the 1000 bucks we just put into it last week. that she just cost us 20 - 40 plus hours of our life in trying to get all of this squared away. i'd say that she doesn't appreciate that she could have killed your child. i mean i'm not asking for a lot here but a simple apology seems quite in order.

i can't exactly explain why i'm so enraged by this minor detail. my best guess is fear. the thought of what could have happened on this day terrifies me to the marrow and i want the person responsible to simply own that. and i know how that sounds and i can already hear mike mumbling something about me being a petty fool and the rational side of me knows all of this. all that truly matters is i've got three healthy family members sleeping in this house right now and we're not at the hospital or worse. i do know all of this.

but the other thing i know is how much i hate shopping for cars so just say your sorry dammit if for nothing else, for making me have to go shopping for cars!

my dad was selling a car on autoTrader.com. he quickly got an inquiry from a guy in africa saying he wanted to buy it. the guy said he was going to send my dad a check for more than double the cost of the car and asked that my father forward the excess funds to the company that was going to ship the car to africa. while a bit of a pain in the ass, my dad agreed happy to get a buyer. so africa-guy sent a cashier's check for $8,000 (4k over the cost of the car) and asked my dad to wire the extra jack to the delivery people. now something i failed to mention is that every time dad talked to this guy he (the guy) used one of those operator assistance services where he types his messages and a third party voices them to the other person. the guy cited a speech impediment in explaining the reason, a touch bizarre, but not a deal-breaker. my dad agreed and the cashier's check came but looked a little off in ways i won't get into, it just looked wierd. but it was a cashiers check all the same, essentially legal tender, so pops deposited it but asked the bank to notify him after it cleared because it looked kinda funky. they called two days later and said it was a fraudulent document.

dad spoke to the fraud units of the fbi and secret service to report the situation. they asked him to forward any further correspondence their way. so my dad, emailed the guy, said he got the check and what should he do next. the guy replied and said to wire the extra jack to such and such company in atlanta or somewhere. my dad said he would do it the next day by 3pm and then forwarded all of this information to the coppers.

the authorities did not do anything with the information in the window my dad gave them (3pm next day). my father obviously didn't wire the cash and was working towards getting the car re-listed and for the most part forgot about it. forgot until he got a call at 2:30 in the morning from the guy (sans his operator assistance) asking where his money was. after taking a moment to ponder the gargantuan balls on the dude my father asked him where a cashable check was. the guy then got haughty with my dad who simply cut him off to ask what happened to his debilitating speech impediment and hung up.

my father later asked the feds why they didn't do anything with the information he sent them and they apologized for the lack of response but unfortunately get thousands of these a day and don't get to all of them. thousands a day. amazing. abso-bloody-lutely amazing.

i drove all over the country this weekend and send the following messages.

1. to the green jeep girl who drives with her left foot on the dashboard: enjoyed swapping the lead position for 150 miles through ohio.
2. to the droves of people who don't understand the purpose of the PASSING lane: (edited for legal reasons)
3. to the mini van whose driver was eating an egg-mcmuffin AND talking on a cell phone in Indiana: get off my road.
4. to the construction geniuses in Indianapolis who added over an hour to my voyage: i boycott your city.
5. to the girls in the red cavalier who worked very hard to catch up to me so they could laugh and ridicule my seat dancing and open window loud singing to Nu Shooz: i commend your commitment to mockery and it is justified, but you can't keep me from the point of no return.

i recently passed a guy wearing a motorcycle helmet ... while driving a car. after secretly mocking him (it's a habit) it occurred to me that maybe i'm the stooge here. i mean someone had to be the first to put on a seatbelt, wear bike headgear and don a cup before stepping up to the plate. and, considering the growing number of prophylactic measures in place around us I think we're about three hallway collisions short of wearing protective paraphernalia while simply walking around. as if I don't look skewed enough already.

did i mention that the driving helmet guy's car was totally covered in bumper stickers. this may be an important point while thinking this through.

I've received multiple inquiries about yesterday's post. I guess my allusion to our getting the car (me playing with the sunroof) was not telling enough. People were also curious what we bought. So, allow me to elaborate. We did buy the car. For Marty, or more applicably for Bella and it is a 1992 BMW Touring Wagon. It's black with beige leather interior (and that's leather, not pleather), has a full-size spare, heated seats, and looks shiny-brand new.

This car replaces Marty's non-infant friendly acura integra, which is now on the open market. So, if anyone, who is not going to have kids in the near future, is interested in this sporty little 2-door, let me know. We'll give you the family rate of 1% cash back. And, oh yeah, all sales are final.

wednesday night, walt handed me the paper and asked me to call about a car being advertised in the classifieds. twenty minutes later we were in the home of the seller looking at a beautifully preserved european auto. marty kicked the tires, drove it around and listened to the motor. i confirmed that the rear windows went all the way down, played with the dual sunroof and gauged what the instrument panel would look like at night.

thursday morning, marty and i stopped by our local garage to talk about the car with our mechanic, gleb. gleb asked a few questions about it (i.e. make, miles, year) which marty readily answered. he then looked at me and wanting to contribute to the conversation, i added that the sunroof was very cool and had this button which made it go this way and that. he looked at marty who hung her head in a disapproving manner and they resumed their discussion as if i wasn?t there.

regardless of their ill-appreciation for the finer points of a classic car, i spent thirty minutes opening and closing the fore-mentioned sunroof on saturday.

The greatest caveat to ill-fortune is that you are bound for things to pick up around the corner. Such is the case with my car stereo. If one gets swiped, a replacement gets bought. In my case the stand-in serves as a significant upgrade at half the cost. I made it my mission to locate an MP3 capable in dash CD player. At the time of this writing, unearthing such a unit was no small task. If you have not done similar research, prepare to be dumbfounded.

One could say that the car stereo industry does not have their finger on the pulse of the people, but that would be a grotesque understatement. All the major players have absolutely neglected the current phenomenon known as MP3 and Napster. For the few that did try to get their arms around it, only one did it right. They also happen to be the first to market. Aiwa produced the first and almost exclusive head unit that possesses the basic functionality anyone with an internet connection and cd burner would seek. The others are now scrambling to meet the demand but are all eons away from actually putting product in the hands of the consumer. Given this, I would direct anyone with a similar thirst to AIWA's CDC-MP3.

A few days back my car was broken into and stereo stolen. In speaking to the insurance adjuster today he said that the car may possibly have to be considered totaled because of a mar made on the dashboard in that it would be too costly to replace the dash on a ten year old car. Now this has not been confirmed as of yet, but I simply find it amazing that it is even a possibility due to a single and smallish imperfection. Anyone want to buy an almost perfect automobile?