A Brand New Hobby!

I am a 42 year old computer programmer with 5 kids and a beautiful wife. Still, life can get kind of hum-drum and boring. Having regular routines is pretty important, especially for the kids, but sometimes you feel like you are just going to go nuts without some variety.

My wife and I recently discovered something really exciting to do in our spare time, sometimes even spontaneously when we aren't planning it too! We've been doing this for a while now and I have to tell you, it's really put the spice back into our marriage. Our "Naughty" new hobby isn't something we would probably admit to any of our friends either, but I can blog about it because, well, nobody reads my blog.

What is this new hobby, you ask? Maybe I shouldn't talk about this openly. Ah, what the heck. The new hobby that is giving my wife and I such a thrill lately is stealing cars. Thats right, stealing cars is really fun.

Now, you might think that stealing cars is not something that people should be doing, especially if you have kids and responsibilities, but before you judge me you have to think about it a little bit and imagine what it's like. It's a BLAST!

I stole this car yesterday, I think it was a Camry or something, and someone must have noticed my jerking around with the steering wheel column and starting it with a screwdriver because I didn't get four blocks before there were two cops right behind me. You know how when they show on TV the cops in hot persuit, and you someone always says "its stupid to run because you always get caught" but actually that's not true. The truth is you hardly ever get caught. You just can't let the chase go on so long that they got a helicopter involved.

Also, what most people that get caught do wrong is that they stay on the road. Cops are pretty good drivers but get them off the road and they slow down, because they don't want to die. Something else that most people don't know is that if a building isn't made with concrete blocks, it won't even slow down a car going eighty miles an hour.

Lots of times when I'm driving around, going to work, or actually looking for cars to steal, I focus on the neighborhoods and landscapes and check out places where you can take a car off of the road and shake anything that might be chasing you. Sometimes I actually drive my car as though I was being chased, for practice. Sometimes that actually results in starting a chase :D

After a while, simply stealing cars gets boring so you can keep it interesting by doing the kinds of things in a stolen car that would would NEVER do with your own car or a car that belongs to someone you care about. Also, you can do stuff with a stolen car that you would also never do in your own car because someone will get your license plate and the police would be waiting at your house when you got home. You can be completely anonymous in a stolen car, especially if you have a ski mask.

Here's a fun thing to do: Steal a car and then drive somewhere like a kids sporting event or an outdoor mall where there is a large crowd of people and you drive the stolen car right into the center of the crowd. Before anyone can really do anything, you get out of the car (with the ski mask on) and start firing shots into the air. Unload the whole magazine, really quick, bang bang bang. Watch everyone scatter! All you see is asses and elbows moving away from you in every direction. It's hilarious!

Then there was this other time we stole (sometimes my wife and I do it together, other times we just operate independantly because usually one of us has to be home with the kids) and we drove it all around the inside of parkside mall making a huge mess just like what they did in the Blues Brothers movie. That was a riot, we were passing back and forth the camcorder. I should post that somewhere, maybe if I can figure out how to pixellate our faces.

This other time I took a Ford Explorer and got about 2 miles before I realized there was a kid in the back. He was so scared, I was trying to take a picture of him with my camera phone but it didn't come out. I dropped him of near a fire truck that was parked at 7-11.

Anyway, fun stuff, and I could go on and on but I gotta get up and start picking up around the house before my wife gets home or she'll wonder what the heck I've been doing for the last half hour.

Nancy Hulda Morris Olson Mahusay Palantios 1937-2008

My mother was born to a family of Norwegian immigrants in Boston. When she grew up she fell in love with a greek man named George Palantios. They wanted to get married but because he was greek her father refused to allow it. Instead, she was allowed to marry the son of Swedish immigrants from Brooklyn. She was studying medicine and he was studying biology but later it was revealed that he had been harboring a secret desire to be a dirt poor paster of the smallest little church in the tiniest town he could find in Vermont and live like the Amish without actually being Amish.

Much to his chagrin, she managed to achieve a masters degree from UVM where she also learned, to her surprise, that she had rights. She also learned that she really didn't like being the wife of a dirt poor paster of the smallest church in the smallest town in Vermont so they decided to see if moving the shittiest town in Florida and getting horrible government jobs working at a state mental institution and tazering their children with culture shock would help their marriage.

Surprisingly it did not. A few years after their divorce, my mother married a Phillipino psychiatrist and also discovered anti depressant drugs. For about 15 happy years they lived and worked together, starting their own practice in a less shitty Florida town. She earned her PhD in psychology and even developed a proficiency with Novell Netware. He passed away, and she retired.

But her heart had been broken now for fifty years. She never forgot, yet never spoke of George Palantios.

George never forgot her either. For fifty years George had remained unmarried, and everything he experienced, for better or for worse, he often imagined being able to experience it with Nancy. He talked about Nancy often. Fifty years after his heart had been broken, he was sharing an old story with an friend where he was now living, in Burlington, Vermont, and his friend surprised him with Nancy's phone number.

They talked on the phone for a year. Then they got married. They had a little time together.