Kind of a fucked up day for me.

I wasted yet another day of vacation because the repair guy (supposed to show up at noon) didn't get here until 7:00.

I watched Rob and Amber Get Married, tivoed when it originally aired but never watched. Brilliant move, that was. Watching people in love starting a new life together. Just fucking brilliant.

So eventually my A/C got fixed, and I went to Rich O's to celebrate.

The place was crowded as fuck. It was more like a Friday than a Tuesday. I text-messaged RealTrainGirl about the crowd but I guess she's joined the legion of women that are pissed at me after all. This made the third message in as many days that she's ignored. Or maybe she just hasn't been getting them. A lot of that going around lately. Fortunately for me there's currently only one woman on Earth that is capable of truly hurting my feelings, and it's not RealTrainGirl. I'm mostly invincible.

So I hadn't been in Rich O's for more than ten seconds when TallLady started in on me about smiling and why I wasn't doing it. I'm afraid I got a little gruff with her. I don't smile on command, and I told her so.

She apologized for offending me, but I told her that she hadn't offended me, she had annoyed me. If she had said "Smile, you pumpkinheaded fuck," then that would have offended me.

To drink, I had a Spezial Rauchbier. Very good as always.

Next I did some experimenting.

Dave's Double Chocolate Cherry Ale

(mixture) I mixed Bell's Cherry Ale and Young's Double Chocolate Stout in a 1-to-1 ratio. Just a fantastic combination. A nice deep red color. Chocolate flavor that's followed by a slightly sour finish. I'd definitely buy this if it was available commercially. Yummy.

Next I had the rest of the Young's, straight this time.

Next I had a pint of Guinness, for no reason other than its low ABV.

I stopped and saw VigilanteGirl on the way home. Her normal voice has returned. Oh well.

Tonight I missed her more than usual. I blame the television I watched earlier. Unfortunately, whenever I let my thoughts stray to topics like love, marriage, happiness, whatever, my imagination always reveals the same person standing next to me. This sucks, but I guess I'm getting used to it.

One interesting thing about tonight: I was talking with this dude about this girl that obviously had the hots for him. He didn't know it. Didn't want to believe it. My advice to him was to just go for it. To just grow a pair and take a fucking chance.

See, I can advocate bravery as long as it's not my own heart on the line.

I guess VigilanteGirl's ear infection has spread to her sinuses.

I certainly hope she feels better soon, but for now, WOW!

Her voice, softened and sultrified (yes, that's a word, now - I just made it up) by her condition, is now so sexy it makes me weak in the knees.

She doesn't think it sounds that great, but I assured her that no matter how bad it might sound inside her head, it sounds fantastic everywhere else.

I suggested that she record a new voice mail greeting to take full advantage of her sexy new voice. Her current greeting sounds nothing like her - more like her mom or her grandmother.

Of course, if she does change her greeting, it still won't sound anything like her once her normal voice returns. It will instead sound like one of those phone sex girls that advertise on late-night TV:

Please call me. I'll be waiting for you.

Her greeting could say:

Please leave me a message. I'll be sure and call you back. You sexy thing.

One of the most common traits of just about any personal 'blog is that nobody cares about 90% of the crap that gets posted. People may enjoy reading for the humor, or for the drama, but the actual content is actually unimportant to almost everyone except the actual 'blogger.

This entry is an example of something nobody cares about. Except me.

Yesterday I dug out an old pair of shorts, shorts with a 32-inch waistband.

I haven't been able to wear 32s in years. I've been wearing 34s and even some 35s.

But now, because of all this weight that's been mysteriously disappearing, I can wear 32s again. They actually fit, which is a lot more that I can say for the shorts I had been wearing. They kept threatening to fall right off my skinny ass.

I'd been looking like one of those damn kids I see all over, with my pants halfway down my ass. Hey, maybe all those kids haven't been showing stupid fashion sense after all! Maybe they all just lost a lot of weight!

So the good news for me (and for the ladies) is that I'm not a lardo anymore.

The bad news for me is that I only own one pair of pants that fit me. I threw all my other 32-inch pants away years ago. Then my sister dug them all out of the trash and put them in the garage for the mice to build condos in, but that's another story.

So now I've either got to go do some clothes shopping, or just start eating ice cream and cheetos again.

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?