Marketing for Romance Writers

52-Week Blog Challenge

Week 21: My Best Gift Ever

#MFRWauthor

Yousa! Where o’ where has the year gone? It’s less than a month away from summer. Is it? I’m still holding out for spring to act like spring. It did yesterday and will for the upcoming week! Dare I hope? My one and only rose bush is growing.

Grab a cup of coffee or glass of wine. This is a long one.

On to the Topic:

How do you choose one favorite gift out of a lifetime of gifts? I’m curious to see what other participating authors wrote about. I call a few things favorites. The birth of my boys—a wonderful gift. I can’t count all the gifts from my sons, my best friends, or parents. My best friends and family are/were gifts.

My choice today may sound selfish to you, but this post is about a gift I gave myself. It took five years to pay for it.

Here’s how it all started

My husband and dad subscribed to Popular Mechanics. Haha, you didn’t see that one coming, I bet. Do any of you remember the magazine? I first read about this “gift” in my dad’s copy while visiting him. I came across a page for a newly designed pickup truck. Yes, I said pickup truck. As weird as it sounds, I fell in love with the body style. When this truck finally became available a couple years later, I bought one for myself. Me, a person who throughout life always put others first. Edited to add: I didn’t buy the redesigned second-generation model that came out in 1994 but thought about buying it and waited until 1995.

MYSELF:

I remember the day I dragged my husband to the dealership to look at said Ram. Well, I tried the first day, but he wanted nothing to do with it, but I talked him into coming along on the second day while he did his best to talk me out of buying it. Backing up a bit… First, I called the dealer, told him how much money I made a year, and asked him how he could get me into a brand-new Ram truck. Of course, his response was, “Come on down, and I’ll fix you up.” I imagined him rubbing his hands together thinking I’d be an easy sell.

The day we went to look and test-drive one—the dealer, a tall, dark, and handsome guy ignored my husband and totally catered to me, since he knew this truck would be mine and all mine.

We took it for a test drive, all three of us. The dealer knew who’d be paying his commission, so he pushed his way past my husband to sit in the middle to point things out to me on the biggest dashboard I’d ever seen. Someone once told me the console could be used as a picnic table because of the size. I’m surprised the dealer didn’t get decked and knocked to the ground by my husband. Oh, I liked the idea of being in control this time and my husband’s reaction to me taking over the conversation while he kept saying, “We’re only looking.”

I wasn’t only looking.

I Came to Buy:

I chose black as the color. Bad-ass black on a bad-ass looking truck. The dealer tried to talk me into red. Nah, I wanted black.

At home later, I glanced into the driveway. My oldest son had a black truck. My youngest son had a black truck. Well, I grabbed the phone and said to my dealer, “Clean up the red truck.” So, ladies and gents, that was that. I became the proudly-in-debt owner of a brand-new Ram. A gift to myself. Yeah!

Kodak Moment:

My dad took me to get BIG Red. I remember his pride—a look I’d seen before after I’d given birth to his first grandson. He always wanted me to be independent. Here I was a grown woman and my dad took me to pick up my first solely owned vehicle.

While waiting for it to be brought around to me at the dealership, my dad smiled, and said, “This is a real Kodak moment.” He followed me home. Little old me behind the wheel of that big truck, with Dad following behind, almost brought tears to my eyes. So, yes, this is a selfish post about what I gifted myself, but I don’t care this time.

I LOVED driving this truck and had wanted to make it mine—to stand out from the other thousands of 1995 red Dodge Ram pickup trucks on the road, so I bought chrome bed rails and had them installed, and a black bug deflector for the hood. Of course, I added a Mopar® front license plate. I called her Lady in Red and had logo made (in red lettering) as a decal for my back window. Oh, boy. Doesn’t this sound crazy?

To wrap up an already too long post, I’ll say I drove her for eighteen years. Sure, she had rust on the doors and here and there but only about 126K miles on the motor, albeit, things began to go wrong one little expensive item at a time. When the gas tank strap fell off, and I prayed to get home safely one day, I knew the time had come to say farewell.

I donated her to Wheels for Wishes benefiting Make a Wish and almost cried when the guy came to tow

Eighteen years later.

Red away. In fact, I did have tears in my eyes while snapping a picture pictures of her going down the street on a flat-bed. She and I had gone through many life-changes together. Go ahead and laugh at me for referring to my truck as if she were a relative or best friend.

Oh, Jeez. I am certainly good proof of my astrological sign of Cancer with all these emotions of late.

Cancer: Deeply intuitive and sentimental, Cancer can be one of the most challenging zodiac signs to get to know. They are very emotional and sensitive, and care deeply about matters of the family and their home. (In this case, their pickup truck.)

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Remember, this is a 52-Week Challenge Blog Hop. You can find other posts at the Marketing for Romance Writers Blog with a whole list of participants. Also, remember, Marketing for Romance Writers isn’t only for romance authors.

On a personal note, I have to say I’m sorry for not getting around to visit as many #MFRWauthor or other blogs as I wanted to last week. Preparing for General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) had me crazy, even after I researched and worked on it for months because it went into effect today, May 25, 2018. Many of us as a whole complained about doing this, but in the end, it’s never a bad thing to protect our privacy and to learn what the sites we visit do with the information we give to them. 

Finally, I added my privacy policy both for my newsletter and this website to my menu, and I set up the newsletter sign up form to be GDPR compliant. 

One more thing… If you’re on my mailing list, I’d like to ask you to check your Spam folder if you haven’t received a newsletter this week. It isn’t too late for you to respond, but it’s too late for me to contact you via newsletters as of today.

Enjoy your weekend.

For those of you celebrating Memorial Day weekend, please be safe.