"Don't Touch That Dial... It's Pre-Programmed!"

This is not an endorsement, ha!

For the last couple of months or so, I've been renovating the garage, turning it into my art studio. Without going through all the horrible details of demolishing perfectly good walls to add fiberglass insulation, I have been having good and bad visions of how this project will look when finished. In the process of renovation, many large materials have to be incorporated and large materials like four by eight sheets of anything is impossible to jam into the trunk of a four door sedan.

 Nor can it be tied to the roof of a four door sedan. I know. I've tried. On many cars!

I thought about asking some friends at the local coffee shop if they could help me out. In Folsom, everybody's second car is a sedan. Their first vehicle is a big, honking four by truck with a trailer hitch, a tool box and some mud boots turned upside down between the tool box and the cab. I thought about asking them for assistance, but the return favor might be more than I bargained for, like gutting a deer, or scaling an ice chest full of speckled trout! Besides, I really don't have any close friends here in Folsom... acquaintances, yes, close friends willing to haul sheets of plywood, insulation, sheet rock and such... nah!

Although it says that you can rent this wonderful van for only $19.00, it actually cost $25.00 excluding gasoline refills. I know. I've driven this exact vehicle thirty-five miles to and from Folsom, LA hauling stuff I can't take in my car five times already. I will probably have to use it once or twice more before this project is complete.

But the really cool thing is that using the van as much as I have, I have all the buttons on the radio pre-programmed for the channels that I love. Not that I really love radio. To me, it is a vast wasteland, but when you are out and about doing things that are not the norm, it is always good to have something familiar...like every sports talk radio channel available, NPR, The Think Tank, and the local college rock stations. Whenever there's a commercial on air, I just hit the old button and "BINGO'.

The first time I used the van, I programmed the buttons so I wouldn't have to be preached to, or screamed at, forced to cry in my beer or sold one political bag of nonsense or another, but I never expected the channels to stay the way I set them up.

Either this poor van is seldom used or someone out there has the same "musical tastes" I have. What a coincidence.