blackheartdown

Saturday afternoon I was driving up to Flint to run a bunch of errands and was listening to Public radio out of CMU which was having it's 2 or 3 hours of Hispanic music. I was never sure why the Midland area would have dedicated Hispanic music, and one of the public radio stations in the Detroit area wouldn't (maybe there is a large Mexican immigrant population in central lower Michigan, maybe it's just a public radio quirk). But I was in one of those moods, and I decided mariachi music, accordians, and Spanish language sounded good, so I left it on. After about 45 minutes of this, I made a decision to start learning Spanish. Both my boys are learning Spanish (their school requires they have Spanish every semester, 1st-8th grade). I have been brushing up on my French language skills with language CDs in my car, but now it looks like I won't be needing it for work much longer, so it seems the maybe Spanish would be more useful and fun with my boys. So, I'm going e-baying for Spanish language CDs.

Driving back from Flint, I decided to skip the interstate and take the back roads. I was almost out of fuel, and taking a circuitous route through the old farming area between Flint and my small town, where the beautiful old farms, barns, and farm houses are being choked out by the relentless subdivisions. Thankfully, due to the housing crash, this area has a couple years of reprieve before being completely strangled by suburbia. My house lost half its value, but at least the mortgage crisis helped keep our small town small, and the surround area country, a little longer. I cursed myself for not having my camera with me because I ran across a really awesome looking dilapidated farm house that had already had its porch steps demolished and its windows and doors removed and the land all around it bull-dozed, yet it still looked majestic in an eerie way. I'll have to go back before it's too late.

The Spanish music ended and then came an hour of news related to Central and South America. My low fuel light came on, which added to the pre-existing distraction of the air-bag light that comes on intermittently since I got the rusty rear bumper replaced with a shiny new one last fall (I'll take care of that eventually). There are some interesting news stories on, and one female correspondents is speaking english with a heavy latin accent, and says "Nicaragua", and it sound so sexy. "Nikga-hoawgwa" where the h has the slight rolling "r" and the whole hoawgwa is drawn out and exaggerated. And I laughed because it made me think of mogwai from the movie Gremlins. I imitated the way she said the word about 30 times as I drove around listening to other news stories before I finally found a gas station and pay $106.37 to put 29 gallons of gas in my truck. Uggghh. I need to buy a car!
I headed for home and repeated Nikga-hoawgwa another 12 times or so. Prairie Home Companion came on. Normally I would listen because I enjoy the program (hey it's no This American Life or Radio Lab or Studio 360, but it's fun), but now I've got Latin America on the brain, so I took out my iPod and put on CSS and enjoyed the rest of the ride home.