License Plates

I don't generally blog from home but here I am. Some of you know of my lasting infatuation with license plates. If you don't, here's the story. When I was in high school my parents bought a new car. My mom, the observant one, said, "I sure hope the license plate isn't a ZIT." I was confused, and wondered why the heck she would say that. Turns out, she knew the trick about license plates: In California, they are issued alphabetically, so the first one was 000 AAA 000. Then 001 AAA. And so on. So when they bought the car, the state was on license plates such as 000 ZIT and 001 ZIT etc. Turns out, mom didn't need to worry. Our license plate was xxx ZYT. Hmmmm. Maybe she should have worried a bit more, because how else would someone pronounce ZYT but "zit?" But things made sense then. We'd had an old station wagon: 535 EOL, and an old '68 dodge dart: ZST 196. My dad's dodge colt: 137 UJQ. Later we drove that colt to Texas, and then it was HCQ something. Texas followed the same license plate pattern. And so does Oregon.
It's fun when license plates spell things besides ZIT. I've seen vans that have the letters CAR, and cars that have the letters VAN and VCR. We're generally unfortunate in the plates we get, things like UJQ, HCQ, PGQ, VBB, VKZ, YCF, and XJZ. We gave our girls personalized plates for Christmas one year: BUN 1 and BUN 2. It's what they call each other. I don't know why. I hope to see a plate on a VW bug that says BUG (by accident, not by design). Right now the most recent plate I've seen is EDF. Soon there will be an EGG. Maybe it will be on a yellow car.

home again

And seriously jet lagged. I tried to stay awake as long as I could, so I went to bed at 9. I woke up at 3 am. 3! If I count right, in the last 54 hours I have slept for about 10 hours. If you would like to sell me a ladder to the moon, today is probably the day to do it. I'd think it made perfect sense.