11/21/00: Puppy
Today I'm going to tell you the story of Puppy, since I told my current favorite Tek guy the story this morning while he was installing my sound card.
Puppy was my car in high school. He was a 1982 Buick Regal, only the R was missing off the word Regal on the dashboard, which made him even more puppy-ish. He was named Puppy because he tried really hard, but still had accidents. ::drum roll::
I actually don't remember how he came by the name of Puppy, only it seemed to fit him. I have a tendancy to call any sort of large, insolent but endearing machinery "puppy." Like a computer, or a VCR that deliberates before it will spit out your tape. Puppy was the ultimate puppy. Also he was sort of hangdog. Light blue, except for where he was replaced with beige (front fender). Kind of rusty. A bumper sticker that said, "My goddess gave birth to your god." Gotta love it.
Puppy didn't have a tape deck, just a My First Sony tape player that was seat-belted into the front seat. I used to call the My First Sony "Mini-Pup", which was in the days before Mini Me. I just thought that the tape player could be Puppy's puppy. The little thing that held in the batteries was missing so I had to duct tape the batteries in, but it didn't quite work, so every time I'd go over a bump I had to reach over and push the batteries back in.
When Puppy was still my mom's car, when it wasn't really Puppy yet, she took it on a long trip with my sister to look at colleges. While they were driving on a big highway, the horn sounded and wouldn't stop. Just one long beeeeeeeeeeeep. They had to pull over at a service station, where the guy physically cut the horn line. My step-father and step-brother are car people, so of course they had an extra horn lying around. The thing is, Puppy was a quite large car, and the horn they found must have been for a little Honda. It made a sound kind of like the Roadrunner's "me-meep!" Very amusing. It used to kind of freak people out, like when a very large, muscley man has a soft, feminine voice.
When I went away to college, Puppy rusted away in the driveway. Finally my mother and step-father had to take him to the pound, where they sent him to the Great Parking Lot in the Sky. Poor guy. Presumably before they sent him off, my step-father stripped off some of the more useful parts. I don't know what they did with Mini-Pup.