Back in January, I wrote about this time I drove from Seattle to Las Vegas.

One thing I didn't mention about that drive was what happened after 3:41 AM that Saturday morning.

So I'll write about it now.

At about 1:00 AM I was just barely into Nevada. I'd driven all day, and I was pretty tired. I'd read that Nevada laws allowed overnight parking on the side of the road, so that's what I did. I left the two-lane highway, drove a short distance down some unmarked gravel road, and pulled off onto the shoulder to get some sleep.

I was out almost immediately.

At 3:41 AM I woke up. The clock in my dashboard was just incredibly bright so I definitely knew what time it was. That clock is burned into my brain.

I stumbled out of the car to take a piss.

About halfway through my piss I guess I woke the rest of the way up or something, because I noticed.

The stars. Those stars are also burned into my brain.

I'd gone 28 years without ever really seeing the heavens. I guess most people go their whole lives without it. City lights brighten the night sky, drowning out all but the brightest stars. Air pollution puts a haze over everything. Most people don't even notice. Most people don't even question what they're missing.

I know, because I was one of those people. Until that night.

That night, that late hour, that remote location, that high altitude - all had combined to provide me with a display that was quite simply breathtaking. It still gives me goosebumps just thinking about it.

It was like the sky had decided to show off just for me. The Milky Way, shit I still can't get that image out of my head. It was like a pearlescent scarf, stretching from horizon to horizon. Easily the most beautiful thing I've ever seen.

And the colors. The night sky is not black and white. It's full of every color imaginable. You just have to see it to believe it.

On that night, at that time, beside that unnamed Nevada road, I was truly humbled for the first time. I knew then that my problems were nothing. There I was, fretting about a love that could never be, while the entire universe spread itself out before me.

I just stood there, enthralled, for hours. This was as close to a religious experience as I've ever had. I remember thinking that anything so beautiful just had to be planned. Just had to have a purpose. It was hard to accept that what I was seeing was real at all. It just couldn't be random.

When the Sun rose, and the stars dimmed, I realized that I'd been crying. For I had seen God. And He in turn had shown me myself.

Was literally on my way out the door and the repair guy finally called to tell me that he's on his way.

I certainly don't expect any actual repairs to take place tonight, but at least now he'll be able to tell me how stupid I am and how much my stupidity is going to cost me.

Just to make a long boring story short and somewhat less boring, the repair guy didn't show up today.

He was supposed to be here between 10:00 and 2:00, so I took a day of vacation to wait.

At 2:30, I called to make sure that he was really coming. They assured me that he was.

At 5:00 I called again to make sure that he was really coming. They again assured me that he was.

At 6:00 they called me to tell me that it would be at least another hour.

At 8:20 I gave up and decided to go to Rich O's to get some air conditioning.

So tomorrow I get to do it all over again. Except that this time I hope the guy actually shows up.

Oh yeah, my thermometer has been pegged at 90 degrees since about noon. It's still slightly cooler in the basement though.

I've already discussed the problem I had with my air conditioning.

I thought it was over, but nooooooooooooooooooo!

I've still been getting a lot of ice buildup. Not nearly as bad as before but still enough to annoy me, and enough to get the floor wet when it melted.

So today I went to Plan B: Cleaning the outside unit.

I removed the fan and sprayed the shit out of the thing with a hose. With all of the old grass and dirt gone it looked almost new. I reinstalled the fan and turned the A/C back on.

After about an hour, I saw that I had no ice at all. This was a good thing, and I once again figured that I'd fixed it.

But nooooooooooooooooooooo!

After another hour, I looked at the thermometer and saw that it was 87 degrees in the house. This just couldn't be. The A/C had been running nonstop for two hours.

At least the inside fan was running.

I went out to check the outside unit and saw, much to my dismay, that the fan blade had managed to neatly slice one of the wires. I'd failed to properly secure them, the fan cut the wire, and the outside unit had promptly blown a circuit breaker.

No wonder it was still hot in the house.

Desperate, apparently, to make a bad situation worse, I decided that I'd just repair the wire.

Found some electrical tape, a pair of wire strippers, and even a wire nut. I repaired the shit out of that wire.

But when I put the fan back in the wire bundle was still to close to the blades. There was this little plastic clippy thing that had broken, so there was nothing to keep the wires safely against the sides of the unit.

At about this time I got stung by a wasp.

Once I made sure that I wasn't going to die (which I'll admit would have been slightly worse), I tackled the problem of keeping the wires safe without the little plastic clippy thing. I found several garbage bag ties and used them to fasten the wires to whatever I could find inside the unit.

Better, but still not completely safe.

The very top section of wires just kept flopping out towards the fan blades, and there was nothing in that area to fasten them to. The slack that I was using so that I could remove the fan and get to the wires was also the slack that was causing all the trouble.

This is when I got my brilliant idea.

Not.

I found a very stiff piece of wire and decided that if I only had a small hole through the sheet metal at a certain point I could use the stiff wire to reach in through the hole and pull the bundle to safety and really secure the hell out of it.

I figured that I was home free.

But nooooooooooooooo!

What I did instead, despite very careful measuring and checking and double-checking, was drill a tiny hole in the damn A/C coil. Just nicked it, really.

Here's something I didn't know: Freon escaping from a tiny hole in a coil sounds exactly like a jet engine. Only louder.

Needless to say, my home repair skills (highly questionable by this point anyway) do not extend to repairing A/C coils and conjuring up new freon out of thin air. Ha ha. Freon. Thin air. Get it?

So now I get to burn a day of vacation tomorrow so the repair guys can come out to (a)tell me that I'm an idiot, and (b)repair or replace my outside coils.

So far the basement is still pretty cool. My cats have retreated there, and I may just join them tonight.

One of those damn tame and relaxing nights that have become so commonplace lately.

Rich O's was moderately empty. All the cool people at parties again I guess.

I sat on the sofa and talked with QuietDude and DooRagGirl.

To drink I stuck with mild stuff: two pints of Smithwick's and two Guinnii.

Oh yeah, NotGeorge now has a new nickname. He will henceforth be known in this 'blog as SpikeBoy.

I had this great idea to call my friend Eric and see if he and his wife wanted to come down and try some lambics, but by then it was after 10:00 and I figured that it was too late.

DooRagGirl and FutureDude may come and take my old washer/dryer. It'd be nice to get it out of my garage.

Some things I can safely ignore. I can simply pretend that they didn't happen and go on about my merry ways.

There is, of course, the problem of persistence. I can't really just keep ignoring something over and over and over. Doing that ends up sending exactly the type of message that I'm trying to avoid sending. I mean, if I ignore something so many times that it becomes obvious that I'm ignoring it, the whole point has been lost. Perhaps that moment has already passed. I don't know and I'm not about to ask.

It's kind of nice to be in charge of something for a change though. Kind of nice to have someone else doing the waiting. The wondering.

I text-messaged my sister the other night and told her that I was an asshole. When she called me back to ask why, I told her.

"It's about time!" was her response. Or something like that anyway. That was the gist.

So I'm having fun being the asshole. It's my turn, at least for a while.

Eventually, my better nature will win out, and I'll stop ignoring this. Or, more likely, I'll encounter something that I cannot ignore.

It's kind of like a race.

Pretty exciting, huh?

I don't want to go.

There's nothing forcing me there. I could just stay home tonight, the way I stayed home today despite all of my grandiose plans for a road trip to Cincinnati.

A long time ago, over two thousand miles away, I did stop going. Sure, it felt weird for a while, like I was just wasting my free time by just hanging around my home. But after a while, after a while I noticed that I didn't miss going at all. In fact, it got to where when I did go I felt like I was wasting my valuable home time by going out to be surrounded by idiots.

Back then, nobody even noticed that I wasn't going anymore. Back then I was able to quietly slip away and just not come back for a week. Or a month. Or six months.

These days, I don't have the ability to just quietly slip away. These days, people would notice. And people would think they knew why I was gone. They'd start assigning blame. They'd sit there with their knowing nods and their gossip and their "poor Dave" and they'd all feel glad that it wasn't them that was staying away. That was such a pussy.

If I didn't go tonight, people would think they knew why. They'd be wrong, but I wouldn't be there to tell them that. They'd all enjoy their gossip and maybe even get a good laugh out of everything.

I'm not going to try to bullshit myself or anyone else by saying that their opinions would be completely unfounded. It just that, to paraphrase something I read recently - They can't see the forest because they're in love with the trees. One certain tree, in fact.

So I don't want to go tonight, but I'm going anyway. I'm going to show them all that I have not been defeated.

Yet.

This guy at work was kind enough to burn every episode of Lost to DVD for me. I know that the official DVD pack of season one is due out in the Fall, but this way I don't have to wait.

The first 15 minutes of the first episode was some of the most intense television I've ever seen. Can't wait to see it, and 24 episodes of Evangeline Lilly in all her beauty, again and again.

Also, the other day on the radio they kept yakking about this show Hit Me Baby One More Time and how it was a hit. I never even heard of the show (haven't watched hardly any television in several weeks) but I was looking through my TiVo's recordings, and it had recorded three episodes for me!

What a cool show! Even though I never heard of several of the performers, I still like it. The bands that I have heard of are there too.

I can't get Greg Kihn's The Breakup Song out of my head. He's right - they don't write 'em like that any more.

Rich O's is having this event, called Belgian Lambic By The Glass II, this weekend. Pretty descriptive, albeit uncreative, name. C'mon Roger, you can do better than that! I'd suggest FunkFest 2005.

I arrived a little late. VigilanteGirl was busily trying to pick a fight at work so I had to stick around and be her bodyguard for a while.

Rich O's was pretty crowded. This had been fairly typical for Fridays, but tonight's Friday crowd was not made up of the amateurs usually seen. Tonight the place was full of PBDs.

I've never had any lambic beer. I wanted to find something funky. Something musty. Something weird. It took me a while, but I was eventually successful.

Cantillon Bruocsella 1900 Grand Cru

(bottle) Don't know what vintage this was. Incredibly sour taste. Like sucking on lemon rinds. Not musty or funky at all. Drinkable, but not noteworthy.

Drie Fonteinen Oude Geuze

(bottle, 1999 vintage) Less sour than other lambics, but much more of a dry finish. A subtle hint of funkiness in both the aroma and flavor. Pretty damn good.

Cantillon Organic Gueuze

(bottle) Funky and Musty. Very dry finish. Hard to pin down exactly what this tasted like. I liked it.

Cantillon Lou Pepe Gueuze

(bottle, 2002 vintage) Like a regular, somewhat mild, Belgian strained through dirty sweat socks. This is what I was expecting from a lambic festival! A little sour, a little drying, a lot tasty.

Hanssens Mead the Gueuze

(bottle) I kind of expected that this mead/lambic blend would be disgusting. I was right. Probably the nastiest thing that's touched my tongue in years.

I spent most of the night standing up. When I finally did grab a seat at the bar some shithead came in. I really didn't want to deal with him so I moved over to the annex area and stood while I had a Stone Smoked Porter. Yummy.

Tonight, everybody thought I was in a bad mood. They were all wrong at first, but their suspicions became self-fulfilling after a while.