Got this in my email today:

Hello, this is Ticketmaster Customer Service with an important alert for your upcoming event. Kelly Clarkson, scheduled at The Louisville Gardens on Wednesday, August 24th, 2005 at 8:00pm, has been cancelled.

Your credit card will automatically be credited the ticket price and convenience charges, and should post to your account within 7 to 10 days. Please note, the $4.35 per order processing fee and any TicketFast or UPS delivery charges are non-refundable.

I don't know why this event was cancelled, but I bet it has something to do with all of the women being pissed at me on Friday.

That THUD THUD THUD sound everyone keeps hearing is the sound of my readers dropping dead from boredom.

There's not a lot that I seem to be able to do about it, except apologize. Again.

I do have a question though.

Why is it, do you suppose, that I keep returning to the scene of the crime even though I know that it's certainly haunted?

There is nothing there for me except uneasiness and fear, yet I still return every chance I get. The place manages to attract and repel me at the same time. It's almost like I can't really believe what happened there. What I did there. Maybe, I seem to think, if I pretend that it didn't happen then it will somehow magically become undone.

It's like I expect that, one of these days, I'll go back and see that everything is back to normal. That the ghost of my victim doesn't lurk behind every corner, crouch in every dark shadow. That it's all been in my head - some feverish nightmare, easily countered with a couple of aspirin.

In the movies, the people that stay in the haunted castle usually end up being victims themselves.

I are so smart!

It turns out that I had two problems that were causing water to get all over my basement floor.

The first problem I already wrote about. That seems to have been taken care of by a simple filter cleaning.

The second problem was much more sneaky. And when I say that it was sneaky what I really mean is that I'm retarded.

Even though I had no more water around my air handler, the water in the restroom seemed, if anything, to be getting worse.

In the closet off the restroom is where my water heater and water softener are located. It's also where the drain is for the entire basement. It's one of those little holey things in the floor that I guess ties in with some pipe that goes to the septic tank or something. I'd take a picture but it's kind of gross.

Well to make an incredibly boring story mercifully short I have drain lines from my air handler and from my water softener that I keep crammed into these holes.

The lines from the water softener had somehow been pulled loose, and were just laying on the floor.

So I've reinserted these lines into their holes and now hopefully my wetness problem is cured.

Saturday was pretty boring. I didn't know anyone at Rich O's so I just sat at the bar all night.

I had a pint of the Bells Cherry Ale that I'd discovered last night, then I ordered a Mad Bitch. The bartender screwed up and accidentally poured me something I hadn't had before:

Poperings Hommelbier

(draft) I see all these descriptions about sharp and hoppy and peppery - I got none of that. What I got was a pale beer with a huge head that didn't have much of anything in the way of aroma or flavor. What there was, however, was quite good. At 7.5%, this beer is a lot stronger than it tastes or smells.

Once that was gone I had a Mad Bitch for real. Yummy as always.

I also had a pretty good idea - one that I should have thought of months ago.

I deleted her number from my cell phone's memory.

I did this for two reasons:

1. Every time I scrolled past her name it made me a little sad.
2. Without that number stored in the phone I no longer have to rely on my own fleeting willpower to keep me from making a bad situation worse.

Okay, this makes perfect sense.

Not.

I can fly from Louisville to Cincinnati, then from Cincinnati to Cleveland, and return home with another stop in Cincinnati, for $201.30.

Alternatively, I can just drive to Cincinnati and take the same flights between Cincinnati and Cleveland, then drive back to Louisville, for $237.40.

So essentially the flights between Louisville and Cincinnati are not only cheap, they will actually pay me $36 to fly on them.

No wonder Delta is having financial troubles.

Other than that recurring theme, it was fine.

We went to Buckhead's in Jeffersonville.

I had a blackened sirloin that, once I removed the eight pounds of onions it was buried in, was excellent. The fries there still suck though, and I should have remembered that and had a baked potato instead.

I also had a BBC beer that may be new. It was new to me at least:

Bluegrass Nut Brown Ale

(draft) Almost identical to Fat Tire ale. In other words, very drinkable. More of a session beer than anything else. I recommend this highly.

After lunch I went to give VigilanteGirl her Hard Rock shirt. Whatever had crawled up her butt last night seems to have gone away for she was not sniping at me today. We have half-ass plans to meet up at this bar in New Albany later, but history has shown that these little planlings never materialize into anything.

What a fucked up night.

As far as I've been able to determine, every heterosexual woman on Earth that is not a sister of mine is pissed at me.

That's quite an accomplishment, especially since I have no idea what the hell I've managed to screw up this time.

At first, I thought it was every woman in the world, but then I remembered that I'd talked to each of my sisters and they didn't seem pissed. Then I got a call from RealTrainGirl, so the lesbian community didn't seem to have a problem with me.

I don't know what the hell was going on, but I got evil text messages or dirty looks from every other woman I interacted with tonight. LibertyGirl and DooRagGirl tried to pretend that they weren't in on whatever it was, but I wasn't fooled.

To start the night, I had a Spezial Rauchbier. Very good, as always.

Next, I had a sample of this Bells Cherry Ale stuff. My first impression wasn't too good, but it grew on me very quickly.

Bells Cherry Ale

(draft) No aroma whatsoever. The first couple of sips reminded me more of cranberries than cherries. About halfway through the glass I decided that it wasn't too bad and ordered another pint. A little sour, a little sweet. Really quite drinkable though.

After that I felt a little reckless so I did an experiment:

Dave's Cherry Porter

(mixture) I mixed 1/2 Bells Cherry Ale with 1/2 BBC Dark Star Porter, and ended up with something greater than the sum of its parts. The too bitter porter balanced very nicely with the too sweet/sour Bells, and it was just excellent. I, apparently, am a frickin' genius.

Now I'm back at home. I think I should probably shoot a text message off to a couple of girls that are pissed at me, but I'm not going to until/unless I find out what it is I'm supposed to be sorry for.

I don't understand the female species at all.

I'm back home now.

I have nothing else to say.

Maybe later.

I don't know why, but about halfway to the Hard Rock tonight I had a realization. I realized that it was one year ago (not exactly 365 days but during the same conference this time last year) that everything started to go to shit.

Before one year ago, I had a friendship that could have lasted the rest of my life.

But nooooooooooooooooo!

Part of me (rhymes with fart) decided that it wasn't going to be satisifed with just a friendship. Part of me decided that it had been left to atrophy for far too long, so it teamed up with another part of me (rhymes with lock) and staged a little mutiny against my brain.

So now a year has passed since things started, nine months have passed since everything I used to be was destoyed during the mutiny, and two months have passed since I finally allowed myself to acknowledge what it was that I'd gotten myself into. I wrote about how stupid I was, once it had finally sunk in that I'd destroyed a sure thing for a pipe dream.

But this entry is about tonight, and tonight I'm not in any particular mood at all. Maybe a little pissed at myself, but that's it, and that's certainly something I'm used to. Kind of strange to be thinking about missing her and not getting sad about it. I send text messages to my friends back home and I wish I could divert them Westward. But I can't. Or won't. Or shouldn't. I don't fucking know.

Anyway, tonight I went to the Hard Rock to get some t-shirts and eat dinner. I took pics.

This is pretty famous I guess. It spins around.

A fairly big - and fancy - Hard Rock. This was to be expected I guess.

This car was spinning around above my head. It was pretty cool.

With my dinner at the Hard Rock the bartender made a big production out of how good he was at pouring a proper Guinness. I guess he did well (he drew the clover and everything) but the spell was definitely broken when, for my second pint, he poured it into a frosted glass.

When I left the City Walk area I stopped at the Ale House and had, as I've done every night this week, a couple pints of Newcastle.

Tomorrow I go home. I looking forward to it I guess, but not that much. My ambivalence isn't caused by any fondness for Orlando, or by any indifference towards Indiana - it's caused by the knowledge that the place I really want to be (or two-thirds of me does anyway) is 2000 miles away from either place.

Oh, well. It's my own damn fault.

Okay, so here's what I've done so far in Orlando:

The only place with any decent beer within walking distance of the hotel. A lot of taps, but only a few drinkable brews.

Today I went over to Epcot Center and took some pictures.

This is the limo that I rode in to the park. My friend EmptySpace joined me. Koko got pissed about Florida's anti-smoking laws and went back to Indiana on Monday.

This is everything I knew about Epcot before I arrived there.

There was this loop around a lake where they pretended that they were different countries. I took a picture of each area:

Also on the loop was England, where I for some reason didn't take a picture but instead ate some fish and chips and drank a half-yard of Guinness.

Wait, this counts as England. These were some people impersonating the Beatles. I don't know if they were any good or not because I never liked the real Beatles.

I guess some kid died on this ride yesterday. I hope his family got their money back.

Floriday is absolutely infested with these little lizards.

Anyway, I'm not really having very much fun, but at least I'm not just sitting in my room all the time. Tomorrow night I need to go to Hard Rock to get myself and VigilanteGirl some t-shirts.