I haven’t spoken to my wife in 18 months - I don’t like to interrupt her.

Which is why she doesn’t know about a little run in I almost had with the law. If not for some quick thinking on my part, I might have ended up at the Pekin Federal Correctional Institution. And then she’d REALLY have something to talk about.

I made a bad investment in a horserace. It was my cousin’s fault. I put $1500 on a trifecta in the summer and lost it all. And this was after losing my job a month earlier. So clearly things weren’t going well. And I did not dare tell my wife. So my cousin says he thinks I could slip into the back of his company’s loading dock area and steal some merchandise. He was thinking about quitting to join the Army, so he didn’t care. We talked about it for weeks because I had never done anything like this before. The day it was supposed to happen, I got real nervous and decided there HAD to be something else I could do.

Bingo — I found a legal way to get cash fast. It’s through Car Title Loans in Pekin. A car title loan is when you get a cash advance off the value of your car. It turns out my Chevy Blazer is good for more than that $1500, so I was able to get the money, and stay out of jail.

Wife never knew. She just kept talking through the whole thing and I never had to say a word.

By the way Pekin is near Crescent, Midway, Dillon, Tremont, and Groveland.