Westmoreland Asays

A couple of weeks ago, we bought a mini-van: a 2000 Sienna XLE . After selling the small_time dealer Jack (the Maxima), we paid $8000 for a van that has only been driven 50k miles--by far the best deal in town. It has very comfortable leather seats, sliding doors on both sides, and captains chairs in the middle row. The back row pops out, but only with lots of sweat and muscle. It's totally Meg's vehicle ; I've driven it maybe twice since we brought her home. I now drive Alice. She's doing pretty good, even after 14 years and 150k miles. I usually only drive 5 miles a day--to the Albertson's and back, where I'm picked up and driven to Portland. I'd like to get a mid-90's Toyota pickup, but Alice isn't worth anything and I don't have any spare cash lying around (c'mon ADP stock--move on up!). So we'll live with two girl vehicles for the time being . . .

They finally made if official . I fought it with zeal, but alas, the Capital City Asay's will be the last remaining in Oregon. Hooray for roadtrips and White Christmas's!

Aaron, when asked, said he really wanted to run in the Awesome 3000, so we signed him up. The race now accepts kids ranging in age from 3-18, so just about anyone who wants to race can do so. I never ran in the race myself, but that's the life of a baseball player, I guess. He's been informally practicing the last few weeks in anticipation of his big race: every trip up the stairs is a race, every visit to the mailbox is a race; and every, et cetera. I did take him to the local dirt track to practice running in a formal environment, but we only ran two short laps--nothing special. Aaron was in the last heat of the last race of the morning. He was running against fellow 3-year olds. As soon as it was his heat's turn to take walk to the starting line, he sprinted to the front and the volunteers had to hold him back; we'd had to wait for about 30 minutes, so he was anxious to run. I was most proud of Aaron because he finished the race without stopping all whi...