On the way to work, Kelson and I often end up pacing a red Mustang with license plate letters ZAR. This would be very cool if I could find something to go with it, but so far I’ve had no luck. This is partly because there are so few choices of matching plates and partly because commuter traffic tends to have the same cars going to the same place at the same time every day. It’s also partly because the black generic small car with letters TMN that takes our route is in the batch of cars on the road about 15 minutes before the Mustang.

There is hope, though. Until yesterday, I’d never seen ZAR on the way home. Now I know that it’s on the road again between 5:30 and 6 pm, and it follows the same route we do for about half our trip. This could be cool…..though it remains to be seen whether I’ll be able to get the camera out in time should the need arise.

You know that car game where you look at all the license plates going by and you have to come up with a word using all the letters in order? (Okay, now show of hands for the people who didn’t learn it from me.) I got bored with that and started looking for letters that could make the names of characters in books and movies. Then I got bored with that and made it that I had to see at least two from the same source at once. I used to see them all the time, and now I hardly ever do. Then again, I was living at home when I came up with this and my mom’s minivan ended up with plate letters EGW, so every time I was in that car I automatically had one plate for The Wheel of Time.

So anyway. There was next to no traffic on the commute to work this morning, and we were pacing a beat-up little black car with a blue-and-yellow plate starting with 2AEY. It took me a second to register that I could spell Aeryn with that (kind of disappointing reaction time, but LOTR outranks Farscape in my obsession list right now), and I immediately started trying to see the plate on the car ahead of it. (The combo doesn’t count if the cars are separated by more than one car in either direction, you know.) While Kelson, who had realized what I was doing, was trying to speed up to see it, the car behind AEY passed us, flashing 5BLR. Bialar Crais, anyone?