The Fate of my Taurus

I used to drive a Ford Taurus (yes, lame - I know). It was a 1990 model and belonged to my dad before it was officially mine. Pictured here is the back of the car, which I had slathered with bumper stickers at a time when I had an aversion to blank surfaces and felt the need to cover them with displays of one kind or another (at one point I also collected the McDonald's Monopoly game pieces and stuck them all to the steering wheel).

I began driving the Taurus in high school during my Junior year. My dad was on business in Italy much of the time, so his car was sitting around collecting dust and I had nobody to drive me to school, as my mom had to drive my younger brothers to their school in the mornings. So I drove the Taurus. We paid $40 for the school parking permit (you can kind of see it in the picture, under the Scooby Doo sticker in the bottom right corner of the window), which is crazy considering I paid $5 for my college parking permit... but then again, my brother recently paid like $200 for a one semester parking permit. Anyway... I drove the Taurus to school and to work, and then when it was time to go to college, I had to leave it behind because my dad was back from Italy.

That lasted about two months. I had the roommate from hell who had a car, and I didn't want to rely on a pot-smoking beer drinker to get me to Wal-Mart safely.  So my parents decided I could have the car, and my dad got himself another car... a 1991 Tarus (*sigh*... he didn't learn his lesson and still drives yet another Taurus, a 1996 model. The windshield wiper motor has consistently broken in all three Tauri {my plural form of Taurus}) . So I had a car... reunited with my old pal, the Taurus.

Aura Lee, my good roommate that I had for three of my four college years, had a Chevy car. It was purple (although she insisted that we say it was 'dark cherry'). She also had a bottle of nail polish in the exact same color (good if she needed a touch-up, I suppose). The nail polish company decided to sound trashy and call that particular color "Tramp." So we called Aura Lee's car Tramp. And my car became O'lean (you know that stuff that's in the lowfat chips that can cause intestinal distress, also known as Olestra?). Say the names of the two cars together and you'll understand why we picked O'lean.

I had many good times with that Taurus - it made it over 100,000 miles somehow. I think I was driving it on the Perimeter in Atlanta at the time, so I couldn't pull over to take a picture unless I wanted the car to get smashed and never go any further past 100,000. I also drove my dad's 1991 Taurus over 100,000 sometime before mine made it that far. For some reason, I was driving his Taurus on the loop in Athens on the exit for Epps Bridge Road when it happened; maybe I was driving my dad's Taurus because my Taurus was getting new tires or something??  My boyfriend and our friend who were with me in the car were thoroughly unimpressed over my extreme excitement of being the one to drive it over the 100,000 mile mark.  And the third Taurus has beaten the odds as well and made it to well over 100,000... it's the only one that I didn't drive as it turned over to 00,000. You see, Ford never really expected these cars to make it this many miles, so they only put a maximum of 99,999 on the odometer. So it looked like our first two Tauri had very few miles on them in the late 1990s.

So, here's how my car finally bit the dust... I had just gotten married less than a month before, and I was driving to work, which was 30 minutes from my home. The car stalled at the first of three lights that I had to go through. I managed to get it to start again. It stalled at the second light, and once again, I got it to start, even though I saw that the temperature gauge was reading pretty hot. I just wasn't interested in being stranded at 7:15 in the morning. At the final light, one mile from the school where I worked, it gave up. I was fortunate that a police officer noticed me and helped to push the car over to the shoulder of the road. We called a local shop there, and they towed it and replaced the termometer and some other pointless repairs. As I drove it home the next day, it started overheating again, but didn't stall. Very soon after, it just died. We figured it was a blown head gasket, which you don't bother repairing on a car that's only worth maybe $1000.

But wait - the Taurus had potential life in it yet! My husband works with a charity organization that needed a car for their foster kids to drive. They'd wrecked their Taurus wagon, and the body damage wasn't worth fixing. But they had a great engine! So we had the car towed to them in Alabama and they had the engine put in it. My Taurus had a second chance!

My Taurus even returned to me one magical night. My husband had to go to this foster home in Alabama to deliver some stuff, and the U-Haul broke down and he was stranded. Seeing as U-Haul has crappy customer service, he didn't want to wait around for 12 hours for them to come up with a solution. So the Taurus was loaned to him! I was so excited to see my old buddy, but I didn't drive it. I looked it over carefully though, to make sure they were taking care of it. My husband had to return it a couple days later.

Sadly, I later learned that one of the kids had driven it off the road and between two trees. I got to see the photos of it. But that was the final straw for the old Taurus. It was gone for good this time.

My Roomie

Aura Lee was my roommate for three of our four years in college. Sharing living space with somebody can be a challenge, but Aura Lee and I did quite well together. I began my freshman year with the Roommate from Hell - she was a smoker and had lied about it on her application (because she didn't want her parents to know, she said), she was a complete slob, she put empty beer bottles in our trash can (dry campus - hello!), and she had about six different guys in her bed and never changed the sheets all semester long (I know, TMI). Oh, and she enjoyed taking phone calls at 3 am and refused to leave the room even though it was a cordless phone... how inconsiderate was I to ask her to get out of her warm bed and sit in the hall to talk on the phone!
Anyway, I was lucky enough to escape her and find another roommate for the next half of the year. I was sad to move away from Aura Lee (she lived right across the hall), but I was glad to get rid of The Evil One. I ended up finding somebody who actually wanted to move in with her, so we traded for the rest of the year. I got a nice, clean, quiet roommate who left on weekends (giving me the room to myself) in return. It was a good deal. So I thought I might stick with this roommate for the next year, too, because Aura Lee and her current roommate had talked about rooming together the following year. But suddenly one day, Aura Lee's roommate had another girl over in their room, and right in front of Aura Lee, they started talking about how they wanted to arrange the furniture in their dorm room the next year. So Aura Lee thought, "Okay, I guess we're not rooming together next year after all." I guess my evil roommate had rubbed off on her through the walls or something. Or maybe the doorbell that the girls next door had installed in their room drove her to insanity. Who knows. She just had some issues. Did I mention we were also friends with a pathological liar that year? Yep, we attracted strange people our first year of college. Luckily, we stuck together in the following years.
So Aura Lee and I roomed together in two different rooms on the first floor of the building over the next three years. The first room (where we lived for two years) was right across from the kitchen and the RA office - big mistake. RAs are supposed to make sure that nobody breaks the dorm rules (from big things like the beer bottles in my former room to somebody leaving a curling iron plugged in since it might spontaneously turn itself on and catch the building on fire - this was the only rule I was ever caught breaking, which is a very good thing for me), so you'd think the RAs wouldn't be problematic to live near. We also lived next door to the head RA of our whole building. But most of our RAs liked to disregard the rules about being considerate of other people living around them. I think they were all deaf in one ear, because the TV in their office was always turned up so that you could hear it clearly while taking a shower in the next dorm over. They also talked loudly, so as to make themselves heard over the TV. And they liked to be friends with every RA on campus and invite them all over at once. I don't know who was on duty in the other dorms ever, because they were always all in our dorm. Especially annoying was Bike Boy, who was extra-loud and for some reason brought his bicycle into the dorm with him. I think it was actually an extension of his arm or something, because I never saw him without it. Sometimes other people would use the kitchen in the dorm, and they were loud, but when the RAs used the kitchen, they were even louder than in their office somehow. I guess because the room echoed. To top it all off, we lived next door to a girl named Thunder (at least that's what was written on her message board attached to her door). Maybe she had this name because of how loud she was. Her loudness must have caused her premature hearing loss (or maybe it was the RAs that caused it, as she lived directly across from their office), because her answering machine was turned up loud enough for us to hear it clearly through the wall. And her friends always called her in the middle of the night. And she never woke up to answer the phone due to her apparent deafness. But we'd wake up and listen to some of the longest messages ever left in the history of answering machines. At first we thought maybe she wasn't home those nights, but then we noticed that we'd see her coming out of her room the next morning, still looking mostly asleep.
Boy, I'm getting sidetracked. Anyways, we moved out of that room and into a nice, peaceful one for our senior year. It was at the very end of a hallway, so the only loudness we experienced was the occassional group of people coming in through the outside door. We lived next to a quiet RA this time. We actually woke her up once, not by being loud, but intentionally. See, there was this loud banging noise coming from the basement one evening, and we went down to investigate. We found water leaking out from under a door that led to the unfinished section of the basement (the place where we'd go and sit on mounds of dirt when there were tornado warnings during our freshman year)... and this wasn't just a little puddle. It was like a small duck pond at this point. So we figured a pipe had burst, and we went to report it to the RA, who said, "Oh, I wondered what that loud banging was..." Not that it was her job to check out suspicious things such as that, but anyway...
Aura Lee and I had lots of fun sharing our living space over these years, despite the problems of dorm life described above. Here are some good memories:

• Fridays were our favorite days. There were several reasons, the most obvious being that it began the weekend. Also, we loved to go out to eat and would look forward to it all week. We'd decide on a place and then go there either Friday or Saturday night. Among our favorites were Los Portales, Cracker Barrel, and Restaurant. In fact, this photo of us was taken outside Cracker Barrel in one of the double rocking chairs. Oh, and another great thing about this day of theweek: "We don't bathe on Fridays, we don't bathe on Fridays!" (Insert annoying music in your head here)
• Our many chants and sayings included the following: "Kafra's in diorite!" (repeat over and over, chanting, woth a brief pause after the word "in"); "I'm... normal!"; hissing at things/people who irritated us; and of course, the "we don't bathe" song.
• One of my favorite memories of Aura Lee's phone conversations with her mother: She was in her dorm room and her mother called, and while talking, a "private" topic came up. Aura Lee's mom began to whisper. "Aura Lee? are you alone right now?" she whispered. "Yes," answered Aura Lee (I must've been in class or something). "Why are we whispering?" Her mother whispered, "Well, I wanted to ask you if you needed any more... TAMPONS. Because I just bought a big box if you do." Aura Lee at this point said, "Mom, nobody else is there with you, are they? So why are you whispering?" Apparently it was too private to speak out loud even with nobody around to hear. I'm sure she'd be appalled if she knew this was on the Internet!!!
• Our many kitchen experiences: other people in the dorm must've thought we were little Martha Stewarts or something because we cooked a nice dinner in the dorm kitchen at least every one or two weeks. Some of our favorites were quiche with Aura Lee's mom's yummy homemade crust, taco cassarole, and of course, snacks that were not heathly such as sausage balls and cookies. We also had an annual tradition of baking a cake for Phil using the special Phil's Birthday Cake Pans (this is why they were purchased and it was basically their only function throughout college. Oh, except once I baked pumpkin bread in one of them and it got moldy because I made it with real, fresh pumpkin and didn't eat it fast enough.), and one year we burned it somehow (see more on this in the "JOSTA!" post).
• We'd watch Days of Our Lives some evenings, which I'd tape record. We made fun of how stupid Austin was and how lame the whole plot was in general. Aura Lee really liked Kate, for some reason. But taping it was the way to go: we could fast-forward through the commercials and boring parts.
• We would always read the campus newspaper as soon as it came out to see what was for dinner all week in the dining hall. Our ultimate favorites were quiche (sometimes spelled "keesh" by the dumb food service staff), taco salad, ... and that's about it. Chicken tenders were decent, and creamed chicken over puff pastry... but luckily, they had a waffle maker and sandwich line to satisfyus on all the days of nasty entrees. Quiche was by far the highlight of our dining hall experience. They'd always look at us funny when we'd ask for three pieces.
• Our favorite store in the local mall was B. Moss. Whenever they'd have a 40% off sale, we'd get a call on our phone about it. That was always lots of fun. Unfortunately, B. Moss closed in that mall recently :(
• One interesting thing we saw one day in the dorm bathroom was a mesage written on the mirror with a dry-erase marker. Another student had written it. It said: "Please do not urinate or blow your nose in the showers - it is NASTY!" We thought this was weird, because honestly, how would anyone even know if somebody peed in the shower? Does the cleaning staff have video cameras, or secret spies who watch people taking showers? I mean, I understand how you'd know that somebody was blowing their nose in the shower because you'd hear them, but you wouldn't hear peeing over the sound of the water running. Aura Lee made the comment that it's probably more sanitary to blow your nose in the shower, because you're getting soap and shampoo all over your hands, thus cleaning them, whereas most people don't normally wash their hands after blowing their noses. Anyway, we wore shower shoes (flip flops) for a reason.
  

Well, I could continue on and on, but then we'd have a book here instead of just a post. So all that to say that Aura Lee and I have lots of strange college memories!