Zoom Zoom Zoom, or $100 Hashbrowns

I couldn't decide which title to use so I used both. Just when I thought things around here were slowing down a bit (no pun intended as you'll see in a bit), I have a day where there are so many things to post about that I can't figure how to get them all in. So I'll start somewhere near the beginning.

I can already tell I'm going to get a ton of ribbing about this, but I got myself a speeding ticket. Yep, my first ticket in about 12 years. The cops had a little speed trap set up and I got tagged by it. Now here is the interesting part, if the speed trap wasn't there, I wouldn't have gotten a ticket. And believe me, I know how that sounds, like the most obvious and stupid statement I could make, but what I really mean by that is if the speed trap hadn't been there, I wouldn't have been speeding. Complicated? Yea, a bit. So let's back up some. I got up with the kids this morning, but they didn't want anything for breakfast. Eventually Ginger got up, and I didn't feel like it was right that she should have to fix breakfast (more on that in later post). So I suggested we go to McDonald's for breakfast. The kids really seem to like the pancakes, and it would keep Ginger from having to cook. The problem is at this point, it was already pretty late, and McDonald's stops serving breakfast at 10:30. So by the time we get ready and get into the car it is 10:20. So we start heading out, and make no mistake, I was driving aggressively at this point trying to get to McDonalds before breakfast stopped being served, but I wasn't speeding (well, no more than the normal 5 mile over the limit that I usually do). Then I get this one long stretch of road. And suddenly all the cars in front of me are doing 5 miles under the speed limit, so I go to pass the lot of them and that's when I got tagged. It's my own fault, I should have realized that many cars in NoVa wouldn't have been going under the speed limit unless there was a reason (all the cars in front of me had a view of the cop, while the SUV in front of me was preventing me from seeing it). Had the cars not been driving so slow, I wouldn't have tried to pass them, and had there not been a speed trap, the cars wouldn't have been driving slow.

Now here's the part that I just have been constantly kicking myself over. The reason we were even on this road instead of going to the McDonalds closer to our house was because this particular McDonalds we were trying to go to has the 2 hashbrowns for $1 special. Can you just feel the irony in this (and not the "rain on your wedding day" type of irony either)? In my stupid quest to save one dollar I now get to pay a traffic ticket.

The sad part of the tale is we still made it to McDonalds in time for breakfast (thanks to the speedy 4 minute ticket writeup), so even attempting to pass the cars was completely unnecessary. At least the kids enjoyed their pancakes. Catherine ate all of her pancakes and Quinn ate half of his and finished off 2 hashbrowns (saved $1, woot!).