I recovered Anne from the airport today.   She brought back a treasure trove of pictures from her visit back to Michigan, for the celebration of her Aunt Betty’s life.  She died eighty-seven years young, last week.  I’ve selected some of them to share.  Thanks to Kayak Women for the Sweat Betty photo, I luv it.  Also some of these are repeats of Mouse’s blog.  But hey Gals, you lookin’ good on this blog, cause you been PhotoShopped.

Anne noticed immediately as soon as I pulled up to the airport curb that the plates on my car were new.  There is a funny thing about that I need to tell you all.  apparently, the car that Anne drove to Montreal and up and down Michigan and up and down again, crossing the border twice, racking up over four-thousand miles had expired plates.  Also apparent to this Missouri resident, law enforcement agencies out side of Missouri either can’t follow the arcane motor vehicle registration rituals that are routinely practiced in the Show Me State, or simply don’t care.  I wish that I had that luxury.

The plates expired in May.  But instead of registering the car in May we were flying to New York.  We obviously forgot about it until last Saturday when on a rainy morning I started sifting through what I figured was dead paper.  I found the registration form.  Running out into the rain, I verified that said car was with expired plates.  Thus began my paper chase that is the process of vehicle registration here in this back-ass-ward state.  Here is the list of pieces of paper that I gathered: 1) Personal Property Tax receipt for 2007, 2) Personal Property Tax receipt for 2008, 3) Proof of Insurance, 4) Vehicle Safety Inspection Certificate, 5) Vehicle Emissions Inspection Certificate (Thanks Mr. Bill), 6) Registration Form and 7) check (Check!).  In addition to the cost and aggravation of gathering these scraps of paper, I had to endure an hour in purgatory, to get my new plates.