I forgot to mention last week that Monday, January 16, marked the fifth birthday of this blog. Wow, who’d have thought I would have enough to say to keep active here for five years?
Every year in January I have to renew the license plates of the family cars. In Kentucky it was only a big deal in the first year when I went for each car (2007 for the Buick, 2009 for the Nissan). I gave Leive instructions on how to do it for the Nissan, but with both the Buick and I out of state this time, I had to come up with a different plan for the Buick.
At first I considered getting a Connecticut plate, but when I went on the website listing instructions for CT, ouch! If I get my tag here, they will nickel and dime me to death! Instead of listing the total cost upfront, they listed a whole bunch of fees which I might need to pay. For instance, they will charge $10 to check my VIN number, to make sure the car hasn’t been reported as stolen. I’m not sure, but it looks like around here, I would pay no less than $80 to get registered. By contrast, the cost for a new tag for either of my cars in Kentucky is in the 30s.
Because of that sticker shock, I called the county government back home to see if I could just mail the required paperwork and a check to Kentucky. They told me yes, as long as I have a Kentucky address, so I prepared an envelope to send them last Friday. That was the easy part; the hard part proved to be getting to a mailbox, which I did after work. Oh! Why is the traffic always worse at 5 PM on Friday than at any other time of the week? Are there really that many more people working on Fridays? There certainly aren’t where I work. For most of the trip, the cars and trucks barely moved at all, and it seemed that the traffic lights I met were short-cycling, only staying green long enough to let three vehicles pass through in each lane. After I got to the mailbox, I chose to take a detour that went a couple of miles out of my way, to get to some streets that weren’t so busy. In all it took me a whole hour to get home from work, when normally it takes me half an hour. And even half an hour seems too slow, when I can get to work in 10-15 minutes during the morning rush.
The good news is that the auto tag laws aren’t enforced here in Danbury. For months I have noticed cars driving in front of me with very expired tags. Usually the sticker on the plate gives a date in 2007 or 2008. Why don’t the cops stop drivers who have been going that long without renewing? It seems to me that there are enough violators to fund the police department, just with fines from traffic tickets.
