Note to Self: in 2014

Never let the damn car tag expire.

More importantly, don't leave it expired for a year.

It wasn't intentional. For the first eight months or so, we genuinely couldn't afford it. It's only $61 but that is a lot when your household is on a single income. Once Ben started working, we kept forgetting.

On Sunday, we got pulled over. In the parking lot of our apartment. We got a ticket for the tag, a warning for the broken taillight and the car was impounded.

While it was due to our own stupidity, that still didn't stop the stream of explititves from running through my head, and the fact that the officer had the attitude of one of those cocky, stereotypical douchebag cops you see on TV did not help my mood. Seriously, there is no reason for any officer to behave like that. It was nothing he said directly, more so his tone, attitude and general demeanor. You can tell when someone thinks they are better than you. This was one of those cases. Having never experienced this behavior, I never understood why people don't like cops. Now I do.

Anyway! That's neither here nor there.

Tammera was a sweetheart and agreed to give us a ride everywhere this morning. She got here at 8:45. We got coffee and hit then ATM, then headed to the library to print the insurance verification. Funnily enough, the library is right next to the poluce department, an irony that made me laugh. The library has a small pond and playground next to it, so rather than wait in the car while Ben was inside, Tammera and I sat on a nearby picnic table. Almost immediately after our butts hit the top of the picnic table, we found ourselves surrounded by ducks and geese, all looking very expectantly at us. People shy they are not. Once they figured out we didn't have food, the ducks meandered on. Not the geese though. The geese looked annoyed. Especially this one really big one that was standing right by the table. It stared at us with an angry look. Fortunately, Ben came put of the library before we could find out if the geese had seen and could reenact an Alfred Hitchcock movie. We both agreed, it was creepy.

Then it was back down the road to the tag agency not far from our apartment. While I was finishing up there, Ben popped outside to call the police department to make sure we had everything. As it turned out, we needed to go there and pay a fee for a vehicle release. And which police department did we need to go to? The one by the library. So! Back into the car, down the street and to the police station we went, waving to the library geese on our way by. They still looked annoyed.

We had the car back just before 10am. Everything went much smoother than I expected, and ended up cheaper than we estimated.

Tag w/ late fees: $161 Vehicle release: $100 Impound fee: $120 Ticket: $120

Altogether, $501. We were expecting around $800. We have a month to pay for the ticket, plus the tag is due again at the end of this month. Both of which will be taken care of by the end of August.

Yeah, never doing that again.