My birthday is coming up this week. Everyone knows the best thing about your birthday is that you get to renew your license plate tabs and your car registration.

The story of Michigan’s license plates goes like this: In the 70s, they had a plate that was solid black with white lettering. My parents had a few of these sitting around the garage, so I know this without having been alive for much of the 70s. Then the state switched to a solid blue plate with white lettering. This is the most familiar, most “Michiganesque” license plate to me. Solid blue, white lettes, the phrase “GREAT LAKES” printed across the bottom. 3 letters, 3 numbers. Nothing else. Up until this year, the state had allowed drivers to keep their blue plates, even while they came up with new designs (Mackinaw Bridge, college alumni plates, etc). A lot of drivers switched plates, but I stuck to the blue with white letters. None of the other plates seemed right.

The point of all this is that this year they are forcing holders of the old blue plates to switch to the new basic plate design, which is white with blue lettering, like this:

they made me get this

But instead of “SAMPLE”, mine has 3 letters and !!!4!!! numbers. What? That’s way too many numbers. Why’d they have to change the number?
My old plate is this one:


STX 630. I loved that one. It’s easy to remember. STX. Like the river Styx or the band Styx. 630. Like, er, a good time to come home from work? Or, um… yeah, so the 630 part isn’t that memorable. Anyway, the moral of the story is Don’t Mess With Texas.

In other news, I got a new bike today! My wife helped me pay for it as a gift for my birthday, which is very generous of her.

comfy bike
We took them out today (she has one too, obviously) and rode around. I’ve gotta say this is the most comfortable bike I’ve ever had. I had this garage sale bike I tried to ride with D last year, but I was all scrunched up on it and I hated riding it. This spring/summer, I am sure I’ll be biking more.

In other news, the Low hello recorded today. Despite the fact that Robb’s computer kept rebooting itself at various points (the worst being RIGHT in the end chorus during an otherwise perfect take of Strong Leader), we got my guitar and the drums recorded for the 5 main songs we had. We tried to record what we had done of 3 newer songs too, but I clicked on something in Sonar and then the computer rebooted itself, so none of that was saved. Anyway, hopefully we’ll get together again soon and get the rest of it done. I’m not sure if we’ll do anything with this recording or if it’ll serve as demos for another better recording. I mean, how good is good enough? I like the idea of working it more even after this recording to get it REALLY right. We’ll see if our patience and time are free for dinner.