This is my 20 minutes ago.

American Idol has ended, and it's the first season I'll actually miss. Maybe it's because of all the allergy medication I'm on, maybe it's because this is the first year we all watched every episode, or maybe it was just better than all the other years. I don't know. I'm happy with the result, and I was happy the rights to the Beatles songs were finally released, and I was happy to see Sanjaya was still good even after I hadn't seen him in a while. They were all good. Green Day was incredible, and seeing Doug E. Fresh again damn near made me cry like Paula Abdul.

Dancing With The Stars also ended fabulous for me, and that may also be for the reasons I rattled off up above but can no longer remember.

I took my car for the yearly emissions inspection yesterday. I took my car for the yearly emissions inspection today, too. My car is, like its driver, a freak of nature. This thing that was made a long time ago, still functioning well enough to go out in public. In my one-garage town, I had to wait until another "old" car was going to get its checkup, because it's just not worth it for the garage to fire up the ol'...whatever it is for pasty little green me and my bright purple car. My car is a '92. 1992, not 1892. On the way home both days, I passed what appeared to be the little brother of a '57 Chevy. I wonder if that car gets the same treatment when it goes for its checkup.

The people who run the gas station are nice, but you know I have to pick up on the stranger points of our conversations, like the time I mentioned that my flashy thing wasn't working, and was told it was for the best because people get shot using that.

Today, I was asked if the mileage on my car is really the true mileage. As if I wasn't already well-aware that my hair needs a fresh shot of Colorsilk 44RB. My car tells people it has only traveled about 29,000 miles. The Carfax report I got ten years after buying the car and putting maybe 3,000 miles of my own on it hinted that possibly Al at Soundview Chevrolet shaved 40,000-ish miles off that total, but I just said a rather sniffly nasal yes in between sneezes, because how am I going to prove the existance of Al from Soundview Chevrolet when he disappeared as soon as he sold me my car? I recently hit 12,000 days on this planet. It was during a rather bad patch and so that day came and went with little more fanfare than a new tagline in the header and the start of me inverting the numbers in my age when I sign up for updates from websites that are too nosy for their own good. The only reason the gas station owner had asked how many miles my car had done was because the other woman who was there had a car up with over 200,000 miles to its credit. The other woman was a nice lady, she said she couldn't wait to get home and sit in her yard with a book. That's my idea of fun, too, but...the woman who drove over 200,000 miles didn't have allergies. I left my excuse for my low mileage at allergies.

Yesterday, when I found that my day wouldn't be spent waiting for my car to be done coughing into a machine, I cleaned vines out of hedges. I shouldn't have, because the sun and pollen and contortions needed to access some of the sneakier vines left me aching today, as if I had done something cool like dancing a paso doble.

Maybe the reason I enjoyed watching silly TV shows with my family the past two nights is because I spent my days not ending up dead from sneezing through a red light. It's a good feeling, that.

This is my 20 minutes ago.