Driving Alone

My niece was presented this Christmas as one of the Queen candidates for the annual Beaux Arts Ball.

This is relevant to the story only because it explains why Opie and I traveled home separately for the holidays. When I indicated to him that he might, perhaps, enjoy getting dressed up, watching a bunch of teenage girls getting "introduced" to a larger group of people he didn't know, and dancing, he suggested that, perhaps, I had him confused with my other husband.

The long and the short of it is that I drove home on the Wednesday before Christmas and he flew in a few days later.

Which means instead of brightening his trip with my stunning insights and scintillating conversational gambits, I was forced to keep myself awake and alert by enthusiastically singing along with my Road Trip song list titled Songs Opie Hates (not to be confused with the playlist that I use when he's in the car called Songs Opie Doesn't Think Suck...that list is much shorter).  In any case, this is what led me to my first insight of the trip:

1. The acoustics in my car are AMAZING! I never realized what a voice I've been hiding! See, when I'm in the driver's seat, really exploring my vocal range, reaching for those high notes, I freaking sound like a rock star! I mean, it's truly impressive!  But here's the strange thing: the second someone else gets in the car, it messes up the vibrations and I sound like a cat trapped in the closet.

Weird.

2. I also didn't realize this until I moved to Oklahoma but Missouri drivers can be obnoxious.,,and I never knew that when I was a Missouri driver. And it's probably not true in all situations but there was a disturbing amount of traffic on the drive home and an even more disturbing amount of accidents and road construction. In Oklahoma there's a state law that when a lane is closed, you have to merge early and stay in that lane...and most people do! After my fourth one-lane road situation in Missouri, though, I noticed that  a shocking number of people ignore the Merge Now signs and sneak all the way up to the front of the line and then try to shove their way back into the correct lane.

These people should be hunted down like wild game.

But the slow crawl that encompassed much of my drive led me to my final, and possibly most disturbing revelation:

3. There is, apparently, a store in Missouri just off Highway 44 that is called Uranus. And they specialize in fudge. And there are all these signs saying things like"The best fudge comes from Uranus."

And while this is certainly a MEMORABLE marketing ploy, it's also horrifying. Because although I have more than a passing interest in all things chocolate, I don't want anus fudge.

Not ever.

Plus, then all I could think of was the kind of conversations that must have happened in the meeting in which they decided on the name...specifically, what other names did they come up with that DIDN'T make the cut?

It's too upsetting to contemplate.

In any case, to summarize: driving alone does strange things to my brain, I'm considering a career as a professional singer, and my niece rocked it at the Beaux Arts Ball!