Labor Day weekend family fun…

Looking for something fun to do over the long holiday weekend?  Why not take the family to Old Sturbridge Village, for Family Fun Weekend?

There will be all sorts of cool events on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, please visit the website for more detailed info.

If you are a member of WGBH – Boston or WGBY – Springfield…come to OSV on Sunday and show your member card…and admission is FREE!  Not just for the cardholding member, but for up to four immediate family members, too.  Adult admission to the Village is normally $20, kid admission is $5, I think.  So if you have a member card, take advantage of this fun, money-saving day.  Also, if you are a member of either of these two PBS stations, and you have kids, they surely are familiar with Arthur and WordGirl.  Well, both of them will be on hand to meet and greet with their fans on Sunday.

Mike and I are members of both WGBH and OSV, so we’d get in free either way.  But we have made previous plans, we’re going up to Maine that weekend.  But I thought I’d let you know about the OSV stuff anyway.

Have a happy holiday weekend, and drive safely!

Scary trucks…

You know what scares me when driving? Having a Hugh Jass tractor-trailer truck about three inches from my tailpipe. It’s scary because we drive an econobox, and we’d be road pizza should we ever get rear-ended. Even though there are laws about how long a trucker can drive before getting some sleep, we know that many of them are forced by their bosses to disobey that rule, to get the truck to where it’s going ASAP.

The scariest truck incident that I ever experienced didn’t happen in New England, but I think that the fact that we have Red Sox license plates on our car may have had something to do with it. This happened on the New York Thruway, and the truck in question had New York license plates. Now you get it, right? Prolly a New York Y*****s fan who just felt like messing with some Red Sox fans.

Anyhoo, at the time, our car was a Ford Escort. We were coming home from a trip to Cooperstown, NY, and I was driving. It was the middle of the day in the middle of the week, there was almost no traffic on the road, but for me and the scary truck.

The trucker was basically screwing around with me. He’d pull up about three inches from my tailpipe, and then I’d change lanes in the hope that he will just pass me. But he would then change lanes and get up my tailpipe again. He always had plenty of room to pass me if he thought I was driving too slow, but no, he never did. No matter how many times I changed lanes, he kept following me, always too close for comfort.

I was shaking like a leaf by this point, but there was no safe place to pull over. This was a long time ago, and neither of us had cell phones at the time. Oh, how I wish we did. Then Mike could have gotten this jerk’s plate number and called the New York state troopers.

Finally, we reached a rest stop. A GOOD rest stop, as in that it had pay phones and restrooms and a lot of other people around…maybe even a state trooper or two. I swore that if he followed me into the rest stop, I’d be calling the cops on him so fast that it would make his head swim. But he didn’t, and a good thing for him, because we saw a state trooper car in the parking lot. The idiot probably knew that I was onto his little game, and that if he pulled in to follow me, that I’d find a cop to go after him.

I was so shaky that Mike had to drive the rest of the way home. We stayed at the rest stop for a while, had something to eat, went to the bathroom, and just calmed down from Mr. Scary Trucker.

Now we both have cell phones, might not be a bad idea to have the number of a good truck accident lawyer on speed-dial, just in case.

My cell is a camera phone. Very handy if we needed to snap some pics of a jerk like this guy.

I am still scared to have trucks following us too closely.

Trader Joe’s near me!

I love Trader Joe’s, but we hardly ever go there because most of the stores are just too out of the way for us. I knew that they were building a new one out on Route One in Saugus, MA, which is not too far from us at all.

Anyhoo, I was listening to WROR this afternoon, and they ran a commercial saying that the store is now open. Cool beans…we will have to go and check it out soon! It’s a fun store to shop in, and the employees wear these colorful and funny t shirts. And the prices are decent for the quality of the food sold.

The only thing I won’t buy there is cat food.  I tried Trader Joe’s store brand cat food, both the dry and canned stuff, a while back.  None of our kitties liked it, I had to mix it in with stuff they did like to fool them and just use it up.

But anyway, they are also opening a PetSmart (or is it a Petco, I don’t remember offhand at the moment) in the same shopping center as the Trader Joe’s.  Doesn’t matter which, either is fine for the cat food that we buy.

I will let you know how I like this new Trader Joe’s once I get to check it out!

We have ENOUGH rain, already!

I am sick of it. Just about every damned day, it rains. It’s a wonder that our PawSox game this past Sunday did not get rained out. We did get caught in some nasty rain on the way home, though.

It has to end, already. It is still SUMMER, and I’m not ready to settle down on home theater seating and watch DVDs at home. Nope…I still want BASEBALL.

So far, it looks good for this weekend, we have our last New Hampshire Fisher Cats game of the season on Sunday.  I will be royally pissed if THAT gets rained out.

But at least we’ll still get to hang out at the Wild Rover Pub if that game gets rained out after we get there.  Life ain’t all that bad!

When pigs fly…

Well, we know that the pigs were a-flying back in 2004, after the Red Sox won the World Series. But that’s not what I am talking about here. Nope…I am talking about some of the yummiest bread in the world…from the When Pigs Fly bakery.

The company was originally founded in Maine, but now they have stores in New Hampshire and Massachusetts. In addition, their breads can also be found in many area supermarkets, such as Shaw’s and Hannaford.

Mike and I rarely buy big-brand, mass-produced breads any more. Either I make it in my bread machine, or we buy a good, all-natural brand like When Pigs Fly. Most supermarket breads contain all sorts of chemicals and stuff that I can’t pronounce, stuff that I would more likely expect to be found in laundry detergent, blemish acne cream, and the cheese that comes with ballpark nachos.  In other words, you might not want to eat it.

Mike brought home a loaf of the original WPF sourdough…my goodness, that is super yummie!  Good thing, because then we will gobble it up before it gets stale.  It contains no preservatives, so it WILL get stale quickly if you don’t eat it soon after buying it.

If you haven’t tried When Pigs Fly bread yet, do so…you are in for a treat!  You will NEVER want preservative-laden, processed-to-death bread ever again!