Why Can't Hither Be Closer To Yon?

I spend about four and a half hours in the car each week driving my kids from hither to yon.  If you aren't familiar with hither or yon then you either (a) don't have children, or (b) have a very good public transit system. Hith and Yo, as I like to call them (we're friendly, but by no means friends) are easily recognizable, Hith never has a gas station, and Yo is in the No Starbucks Zone.  It is impossible to be on-time to anyplace in Hither  There's a creepy time warpy thing that goes on when you enter there that throws you back twenty minutes and whips your gas gauge to E.  But, once you throw your kids out of the car, you can coast down the hill and wait for AAA at the Starbucks.  Yon, on the other hand has plenty of gas stations, and time to kill.  I usually spend my time there sitting in my car reading and waiting on someone to finish some activity or another....I do enjoy some quiet time and reading is one of my favorite activities, but it sure would be nice to have a coffee.  I've suggested coffee delivery as a service but AAA hasn't gotten back to me yet.

Really?

A guy stopped me in the mall right outside the bookstore entrance wearing an A & F polo, jeans fashionably holey and pinging on his iphone and asked me for fifty cents-- I assumed he meant money as I rarely carry rap artists around in my purse.  I looked at him for a minute, I never know what to say in these situations and I could hardly pretend I didn't hear him when I was nearly close enough to read his text message. All I could think was, fifty cents?  Was the guy in that need of a handful of Runts or a bouncy ball?  The guy was dressed better than I was and standing in a mall! In the end I told him I was sorry but I was saving up for an iphone.  I think he felt sorry for me. 

I've thought a lot about this...

And if I'm ever stranded on a deserted island and a genie pops out of nowhere and grants me one wish, I'm wishing for Nutella.

I Think I'm Forty-Something

I say think because, really, I could just as well be thirty-something, thirty and eleven, or twenty-something, twenty and twenty-one.  I mean technically I could, couldn't I?  I'm not diggin forty-something at all.  Forty-something means that I might be half way done--if you get my meaning.  It's also the number of calories I can now consume in a day without exploding. It's the number of minutes I spend cleaning each day, up sharply from thirteen just a year ago, and, I'm sure, a sign of impending senility.  It's how fast I sometimes find myself driving, both on the highway and through school zones.  It's roughly what I spend each month on herbal remedies for the diseases I only think I have and let's not go into how close it comes to the number of times I must call myself each month to find my cell phone. Of course, forty-something isn't all bad.  Sure I've had to give up the pretense that my gray is just "highlights", but I can remember when Jon Bon Jovi was young, when MTV played music videos and when Johnny Depp was on 21 Jump Street.