Ok, for the next few weeks, I’m going to be working on a project, compiling as many overplayed songs I can think of.

I need your help! We all have songs that we hear everywhere, and instantly get stuck in our heads. I need to know which ones are yours! Please let me know what you think the most annoying, most overplayed songs have been in the last few years.

Thanks!

A few weeks ago, I made a trip up to Ocean City with my mom. We went to pick up some furniture from a relative, which meant that we had to take my dad’s pickup truck, a Dodge Piece-of-Trash. This truck dates back to approximately the Jurassic period, where automobiles lived by Survival of the Fittest and as a result became very tough but also really unattractive.

Since I’m currently working towards my driver’s license and need to log a certain number of driving hours, I was chosen to drive the truck. This pretty much freaked me out, considering the various deformities of the truck and the fact that I didn’t want to die.

To fully understand the situation, you have to know a few things about my dad’s truck. Most notably, there was an acute lack of side view mirrors on the driver’s side, so successfully executing left-hand lane changes usually involved either twisting your body at 160 degree angle, or a large amount of luck.

The pin that specifies the car’s current gear was broken, so it usually indicated a completely random gear at any given time. For instance, if it indicated Drive, chances are it actually might have been in Neutral, or vice versa. If it indicated Reverse, it might have actually been in Park, or some imaginary gear altogether, such as Spaghetti or Dead.

Luckily, my dad gave me a rundown of the truck so I would feel more comfortable behind the wheel. “Sometimes it stalls,” he said. “But all you have to do is put it in park, turn the key clockwise four times while tapping the accelerator with your foot, then unscrew the steering column cap and touch the red and blue wires together lightly but don’t touch the green one, then smack the dashboard with the palm of your right hand while you reset the odometer with your left hand and hum the first few bars of ‘Oh, Susannah’ and it’ll start right back up again.”

Before we set off on our journey, we took the necessary safety precautions everyone should observe before long car tips, even though in our particular situation it was probably pretty similar to giving CPR to a corpse. With my dad walking me through the process via cell phone, I opened the hood (which only took me about eight tries) and peered at the mess of mechanical components inside. This is the first step of car safety, as outlined in The Extremely Manly Man’s Guide to Car Repair and Getting Really Greasy: “Always open the hood of a car and peer inside.” This is vitally important, because aside from making you look really manly and knowledgeable, there’s always the chance that there could be a dangerous hazard inside your engine which would affect the safety of your trip, such as a dead cat on your manifold. Or your radiator. Or whatever.

My dad informed me that I had to check the oil, which, unfortunately, required locating the dipstick. Apparently, car manufacturers coat dipsticks with some sort of special invisibility spray, effectively rendering them the hardest things to find in the known world. Dipsticks are also pretty weird because they're really, really long. You start to pull one out and ten minutes later you’re still pulling it out, and soon you have miles of dipstick and there’s still no sign of oil. It always reminds me of that scene from Mary Poppins, where she pulls enough furniture out of her bag to redecorate Buckingham palace.

I also checked a few other vital things underneath the hood, none of which I can remember, and my dad deemed the car ready for the trip. After laughing appreciatively at this bit of tasteful humor, I steeled myself for the scariest car trip of my life, which consisted of the following highlights:

·        Devil banshee noises from underneath the hood.

·        Realizing that no one, probably not even the Pope, drives the speed limit on open roads.

·        That goes double for police officers, who passed by several times at speeds usually reserved for commercial aircrafts. I’m pretty sure I saw one squad car that had no wheels touching the ground.

·        Finding out the scary way that our truck’s speedometer also doesn’t work exactly right.

·        A really sore butt (truck seats are built for functionality, not comfort).

Christmas reruns! (A trip to the just another blog vault.)

Dear friends, 

   Greetings and Happy Holidays from the Schulmeyer family! I am sure there are many of you who have only met our family briefly once or twice, but we have still added you to our mailing list, for which you should be overcome with gratitude. We want as many people as possible to read about all the exotic places we’ve gone this past year, and how our children are far superior to yours. In fact, we’ve enclosed a quick snapshot of our clan for your enjoyment. Don’t we look great? Notice how we are all smiling and no one was caught mid-blink.  We got this photo in a single try.

   This past year has been one of excitement and successes! All the kids that are still at home joined me and my husband on a month-long cruise around the world last summer. It was the best time of our lives! We had so much fun, met so many interesting natives, and spent so much money that we just HAVE to gloat about it!

   Here’s an update on all of us:

   Toby, the youngest, age 11 months, has passed the entrance exam into kindergarten where he is quickly learning to read the Level 3 Chapter Book readers. His teachers are amazed at his ability to grasp concepts so easily. We, his parents, had quite a pleasant surprise last June when we got a call from Gerber wanting him to star in an advertising campaign for their baby food products. You may have seen the commercials on TV already.

    Our second to youngest, June, age 9, is doing very well in her studies on the oboe. She is diligently working through the Professional Cantatas and Concertos for Oboe book by Frederic Wolfsteinberg. Her teacher at the conservatory in Chicago calls June a “brilliant virtuoso.” She is also doing well in her other academic endeavors, including pre-calculus and physics.

   Jennifer, 15, our budding artist, was recently notified that her latest painting, Tears in a Rainstorm, has been chosen to represent the Youth Artists of North America in the World Youth for Art Advancement exhibit in the London Museum of Art. She has been awarded a 10 billion dollar scholarship for her efforts.

   Marc, age 17, has been accepted into Harvard University where he is majoring in Philosophy. He has started an on-campus discussion group with a few friends where they try to reason out their differences and reach an agreement on important global issues. In his last letter home he said that he is working on a novel and expects it to be published late next year. We are so excited!

   Larry, our oldest at age 24, is serving at an undisclosed location somewhere in Fallujah. The shrapnel wound he received in his leg mid-October earned him a purple heart and a visit with President Bush. Both incidents have prompted him to consider running for president in the year 2020. 

   I, the mother of these wonderful children, am so excited and thankful for each one of them! I have been going to radiation so my elbow cancer is almost gone! Praise God! The Lord is so good! Our beautiful chateau has kept me busy exercising my love for interior decorating. In fact, our house has been chosen to grace the cover of Good Housekeeping’s February 2007 issue.

   John, the wonderful husband and father, is working hard as the CEO of an innovative new computer engineering company called BitWorks. He is blessed with many creative ideas and has been mentioned many times in Forbes magazine. He continues to love each of us, and I thank God every day for sending him to me. Praise the Lord!

   Well friends, I must close this letter. We hope each of you has a peaceful holiday season. Rest assured that however peaceful and perfect yours may be, the Schulmeyer’s will be ten times better.  

Sincerely,

The Schulmeyers

John, Barbara, Larry, Marc, Jennifer, June, Toby and Rufus

P.S. Our dog, Rufus, is doing very well. He’s passed obedience school with an Honors Degree. We are very proud of him.                 

Guys and girls, it’s time to face a simple truth. A truth that we have been hiding from all our lives. A truth that has the potential to completely change the way each of us choose to function on a daily basis. The truth is this:

There is nothing special about your dreams.

At all. Sorry.

This may seem like a very sweeping statement, but as is the case with most of my sweeping statements, I don’t care. I am completely convinced that no matter what kind of wacky, original dreams you have had in your lifetime, you are approximately the 84 billionth who has had one exactly like it.

I know this may be disappointing to you, since you have already told you family members, your close friends, your rather distant friends, and your family psychiatrist about your dream. With some people, it would seem odd if you just came right out and started babbling about the dream you had, so you try to find clever ways to slip it into your conversations, by making it relate to the conversation you are having.

Them: “So the other day I was at the pet store, and I saw this monkey...”

You: “Hahahaha!! That reminds me of a dream I had about this purple monkey who had wings and sang Van Morrison’s “Brown Eyed Girl” while chasing me around my apartment but it felt like I was running through sand so I was able to wake myself up by consciously jumping into the abyss of lemon meringue that had formed in my living room. Isn’t that weird??”   

Of course, when you tell your weird dream, someone else always has to come and top it with the really weird dream they had. This often escalates into a full-fledged battle to see who has the weirdest subconscious, with people trading their dreams left and right in an effort to secure their position in the Weird Dream Hall of Fame. Sometimes you get total strangers getting in on it. You could be in the supermarket, and they happen to overhear you and they think, “Pssh, that weird dream is nothing compare to my weird dream.” So they casually insert their bit in, and you all agree that yes, this person is most definitely a weird freak. 

No matter how many times I talk about dreams to my friends, there’s always a while where we ask each other if they’ve ever had certain types of dreams. To eliminate this part of the discussion in the future, I have composed a list of types of dreams that everyone in the entire universe and probably distant galaxies has had. Feel free to add to this list.

1. Anything that includes flying.

2. That one where you feel like you're falling and then you jerk awake. People have this one like two or three times a night. Really, it’s not that special anymore.

3. When you're trying to escape a monster and you can barely move but somehow the monster is about twice as fast as the Road Runner.     

4. Anything that involves conscious people calling your name, and you hear it in your dream.