Cars & football

Yesterday I went to the Houston Auto Show. We had barely been there 10 minutes, and only pushed our way past people to see the first exhibit of a zillion (Ford), when this overweight man in a wheelchair ran over my foot. Okay, it's crowded, and I accidentally bumped into my fair share of people too, but this guy fully ran over my left foot. After his front right wheel thumped back onto the ground, he turned around with a little smile and said, "Oh, I didn't get your toe, did I?" I gave him a cross between an injured smile and a glare (that I'm apparently unable to reproduce - trust me, I've tried) and walked away. I obviously wasn't really hurt, even though this definitely wasn't the skinniest guy in the world, but the worst part was that I was wearing my new shoes! I know they would have gotten creased/scratched/dirty eventually, but I was kind of annoyed that it happened only the second time I had ever worn them, and it wasn't even my own fault. So now I have one new shoe and one slightly mushed, used shoe.

Anyway, the rest of the show was pretty cool. The only other car show I've been to was the Detroit Auto Show last year, and I think I was sort of spoiled by the extravagance of it, because I kept walking around the Reliant Center wishing I could see more Ferraris, Lamborghinis, Maseratis, etc. Also, I was somewhat surprised to discover that the average person could buy about 90% of the cars there. But there were a lot more cars that you could actually get inside than I remember from the Detroit show, and the neatest part (I thought) was seeing the Pontiac Solstice as a concept car in Detroit last year and then seeing it as a production vehicle in Houston this year. Another highlight was seeing the Dodge Ram SLT-10, which is a regular Dodge Ram with a Viper engine (!). Care to guess what the gas mileage of this monstrosity is? 9. That's right, 9 miles per gallon. But don't worry - it's got a 26 gallon tank, so you can go over 200 miles before you have to fill up your tank. Any by the way, I'm sure the Viper engine needs Premium gasoline.

In other news... the Patriots won the Superbowl! Ahh, who am I kidding - I'm not a football fan. I'm only a fair-weather New England fan. So for me, the Superbowl is just like any other football game - run 10 yards, fall down, pile up. Run 10 yards, fall down, pile up. The only reasons this one was different were because I went to a friend's party to watch the entire thing and the commercials were funnier (my favorite was the Ameritrade ad with the cat, knife, and spaghetti sauce). Plus, we all got to scan the halftime show for more "wardrobe malfunctions." Unfortunately though, Paul McCartney was more of a "family values" entertainer, so there was nothing scandalous. Oh well... there's always hope for next year.

All right, I promise I won't turn into one of those people who only talks about their pets, but I got my hamsters less than a week ago, so I'm allowed a little more time to tell meaningless stories about them. For the first couple days I had them, they slept in their little plastic hamster igloo during the day. I also stuck a toilet paper tube in their cage that they could play with, and this past weekend I also put in an old (clean) sock that I had. Now, my hamsters are a little dumb, so they didn't figure out right away that they could actually go into the sock instead of just walking over it and chewing it up. So I stuck the leg part of the sock onto the end of the toilet paper tube so they could see that they could walk into it through the tube. Well, that was the beginning of the end, because now they sleep in the sock every day. Not in the fancy little plastic house I got them, but in the ratty old sock I stuck on the end of a toilet paper roll.