Skip to main content

Have You Seen Me?


So a few weeks ago I was so excited to get my new CJSTUF license tags in the mail! As a responsible citizen, I put the new tags on my car and went about my life.


Today, between work and errands, I was driving around town. I made a few stops here and there. It was only when I got home that I noticed the back tag on my car was MISSING. Gone. Vanished.


I can guarantee that the tag did not fall off. These tags were screwed on TIGHT (plus the back tag had a vanity frame around it). I retraced my steps and seem to remember that I saw the tag on my car when I came out from giving platelets today. My next (and final) stop was downtown near MCV. I was parked in the lot at the Valentine Museum for about 30 minutes. Then I headed home. 


I called the Ashland PD to file a report and they sent an officer over to the house. On a funny note, when my mom commented on the fact that he pulled up in an unmarked car, the officer remarked, "Well, I'm here for the bachelorette party. Are you the bride?" Too funny. I love a cop with a sense of humor.


The bad news is that because we had to file a report, DMV will not re-issue a new vanity tag because it will need to be marked as "stolen" until found. This could mean that if pulled over, I could be arrested for having stolen tags. We probably don't want to tempt fate. 


But, seriously?!?! Who steals a vanity tag? In broad daylight? From a museum parking lot? And why only take one tag???? I'm very bummed, more for the sentimental value of that tag than for anything else. 


That being said, I think that somehow the Universe knew that I needed some catharsis today because as I went to type this blog post, I turned on the TV and up popped an episode of Friends. Not just any episode but one of my favorites of all time: the 100th episode where Phoebe has the triplets. This episode always makes me cry. In a good way. 




If you have any good ideas for a new license tag, let me know. I go to the DMV on Friday. 

Popular posts from this blog

The Edge of Seventeen

It's that time of year when the blog musings center on my grief journey. Every year, it seems like we are busy with end-of-the-year school activities and the start of summer, planning vacations, and then (kablam)...it's almost July 9.  Grief is funny. Grief is weird. I remember very early after Charlotte died, I watched the movie Rabbit Hole.  There's an amazingly poignant scene where Nicole Kidman's character is talking with another woman who lost a child over 10 years before (played by Dianne Wiest). She talks about grief being like a brick in your pocket. It never goes away. Sometimes you can even forget it's there. But it comes back and makes its presence known from time to time. And (she says) "it's what you have of them."    I probably did not fully realize then what a powerful and true analogy that is. As time goes on, our grief changes. Yet, it is always there on the edge of things. It sits in that pocket and sometimes makes itself known.  This...

To everything there is a season

It's been a while since I used the blog to share my thoughts. What started as some random musings turned into much more than a Facebook post. I started writing this over a week ago but it's taken a minute to actually hit the publish button. Thanks for your patience. Welcome back.   It has been a week (or two) . One of those weeks where everything happens all at once. A week where things need to happen in a particular order or everything‘s going to go to shit. A week where you just seem to go from one thing to the next thing and you’ll figure out what’s going to happen next as it goes along. A week full of work and family and rest and sleeplessness and it never feels like there’s enough time for anything. But somehow it all works out.   A plaque on the library walk in NYC My week started with a trip for work to NYC. It coincided with my birthday. Because of that, I had all kinds of feelings all week about life in general. The week ended with a trip to Florida that, unfortun...

Bittersweet Sixteen

I think about Charlotte every single day. However, this time of year, I'm flooded with all kinds of memories as we commemorate the anniversary of her birth. This year feels like a bit of a milestone. Sixteen.  If cancer had not taken her life back in 2010, I have a feeling I would be planning a massive birthday celebration this year. 16 always feels like a landmark year in someone's life.  I have been thinking a great deal about the last birthday party we had for Charlotte in 2009. We didn't know it at the time, but we were halfway through her treatment journey. We had been through three major brain surgeries and a few rounds of inpatient chemotherapy. Treatments were not going well. In fact, right after her birthday, we would make the trip to Houston, Texas where we would settle in for about 10 weeks of proton beam radiation treatments and a new customized chemotherapy protocol. This was the unspoken "last chance option" to beat that aggressive brain tumor into ...