Parodies Lost

Everyone has secrets. And this is mine. Once a year, my husband and I transform from relatively normal artsy souls into car people. Our metamorphosis inevitably coincides with the Barrett-Jackson Annual Collector Car Auction, shown every year on Speed TV. From Tuesday till Sunday, they feature 30+ hours of coverage of what can only be considered the ultimate reality show. Real people buying real cars at auction. Live.

Now, most of the time I don't care all that much about V8s and V6s, fastbacks and hard tops, coupes and customs, retro-mods or originals. But for this one week, I'm hooked. I'm invested in why one car sells for 50,000 and the same model and year can sell for 300,00 two days later because of a difference in paint colour, mileage, etc.

The people bidding are also characters. There are the regulars - the people who are there every year and drop millions of dollars. There's the Ferrari Guy, and the Suit Jacket Guy, and the inevitable parade of celebrities like Leno, Reggie Jackson, Patrick Dempsey. This year John Schneider did an impromptu concert on top of The General Lee before it hit the block. A recreation of The Batmobile sold for two hundred thousand plus - and the main bidders were all dressed like Batman. I've never actually seen so many Batmen in one place. And when the car-crushing, fire-breathing Robosaurus went up for sale, it brought a respectable $575,000. Who knew?

So, once a year I'm a car girl. Makes you wonder what else you don't know about me, doesn't it? *smirk*

It's been a good Christmas and New Year. I have a new addition to my family ... Shiba. Short for Toshiba (and not to be confused with Trent's Toby). Yes, I finally got a new laptop.

If you know me at all, you'll realize this is very exciting for me since my old laptop (my first laptop) was purchased second hand from a friend. It only runs Windows 98 and has less memory than most people's iPods. No, I'm not joking. The good thing about it was that it had a disk drive (I really prefer them to CDs) and it seemed mostly indestructible - I dropped it once ...

But I'm quite excited about this new friend of mine. Of course, Windows Vista and I have a few issues to work out - seriously, who does it think is initiating the programs I'm running? Someone else?

However, it's got wireless access and lots of memory and it's so shiny and new! It's really very nice to have something a little more up-to-date, and this is as good a time as any to organize my writing files as I transfer them to the new machine.