Late last week, as I prepared to crawl into my Jeep Wrangler to drive in for a day at the studio, something on my rear license plate caught my eye.

The plates expired at the end of April.

Here it was the last few days of May, nearly a month after April 30 and the stickers on my license plate read "04" and "09."

Oops. The man who so often castigates others for ignoring Virginia's traffic laws was driving around Southwestern Virginia on expired plates.

I remembered getting the renewal notice a few months ago and I also remembered going online and renewing for three years but had the new registration arrived?

Good question.

So I went back in the house and searched my desk, always a challenge given the condition of the work space. After several minutes of moving papers, coffee cups and the like, I spied an envelope in a cubby hole: The new registration from DMV. Inside were two stickers with "12" on them and I went back outside, in the rain, and applied them to the "year" side of the plates on the Wrangler.

How I managed to drive 28 days with expired plates is either a testament to good luck or lax law enforcement. Or perhaps the local law saw the plates, ran them, and saw the registration had been renewed.

In any case, I broke the law.

No excuse, your honor: Just plain and simple stupidity.