The Silent I Speaks

Ford Taurus 2010

On Friday, I went to an event sponsored by Ford, hosted by my friends at Clever Girls Collective, introducing the 2010 Ford Taurus.  Riding around in the luxurious, tricked out new Taurus brought back fond memories for me.

My family has a long history with Ford cars. In 1968, my dad had an old Fiat that he basically drove into the ground. I think he abandoned it or sold it when the door fell off on I-75. After the Fiat met it's untimely demise, my dad abandoned foreign cars forever, bought a sturdy Ford sedan, and never looked back.  For my dad, the ultimate car was an enormous champagne-colored Ford LTD he bought new in the 1970's. My dad was really proud of this car, and it felt to me like we were driving around in our living room.  The seats were more  comfortable than our sofa, and the windshield was like some live action large-screen TV.  Through that enormous windshield, my brothers and I watched the world go by.

After my mom went to work in a local factory, her first job after being a stay-at-home mom for 12 years, she bought the car of her dreams: a Lincoln-Mercury Cougar.  The Cougar was red, fast, and symbolized her new-found independence.  She was a working woman, with her own money, making her own decisions about everything from what color the car was to what music played on the tape deck. I think of my mom's Cougar as her declaration of independence, and remember barreling down the highway with Sam Cooke's Greatest Hits blaring and all of us singing along.  Eventually, I inherited that car when I moved to Austin and declared my own independence of sorts.

How I Learned to Love the Michelin Man

If you want to see this video & post, you have to check it out over here. 

Sorry!  BlogHer Ad Rules.

Sequoia Survival Kit

Ever since the tragic disappearance and death last year of James Kim, I've worried about what to do if we ever got stuck along the highway.  Something about that case really got to me, and I have wondered how we might fare under similar circumstances.  We don't take that many car trips, but I can recall traveling through Northern Minnesota during a light snowfall on a long, lonely stretch of road one night, and counting other cars going by at a rate of about one ever two hours.  I worried all the way to the hotel about what we might do if we were stranded in the car. It's not something you want to think about too much, but one thing that can give you peace of mind is having some basic necessities tucked away, just in case...

Parent Bloggers Network  offered me something that offers just that type of peace of mind.  I received a very nice Sequoia Survival Kit from them to review.  Encased in a sturdy red canvas bag that is about the size of an old-fashioned doctor's kit, I found an array of items that would come in handy if we ever got stuck in the wilderness, or even just had to hunker down for a few days during a natural disaster.  Inside the bag are flares, rain ponchos, work gloves, an all-purpose tool, rope and duct tape, along with drinking water pouches and food pellets that contain bars of 400 calorie nutrition.  One thing that I thought was a particularly nice touch was a deck of playing cards, which I guess would come in handy if you had to pass the time waiting for rescue, but I'm sure someone with the resourcefulness of McGyver would come up with some other purpose for the playing cards.

I have a bunch of Red Cross manuals that outline what you're supposed to have on hand in case of disaster, and have about half of the things on the list.  Living in California, we always know that the "big one" might strike at anytime, and are reminded to do this from time to time.  The reason I haven't completed it is that it takes so much time to shop for all of these items and figure out where to store them.  One of the things I like about the Sequoia kit is that I don't have to think about or shop for these items--they're all assembled for me in a handy carrying case.

Last year, we attended a pre-school silent auction in which someone donated a fully-equipped disaster bin.  The cost?  Over $700.  Sequoia's site offers similar ready-made bins for home use in case of such disasters, all for about $300. Rather than spend hours at a number of different stores looking for all the items, it seems like a much better deal to me to just buy one of these and keep it in the garage, along with some extra bottled water and cans of tuna.  Hopefully, that will get us through any disasters that might come our way.