If you’ve done six impossible things this morning, why not round it off with breakfast at Milliways, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe?
So far this has been an excellent birthday. Unlike most everything I say or write, that is pointedly not dripping with sarcasm. I am, as many of you know, the dead sexiest computer geek in the world, so I was on-line when Bud’s internal clock rolled to 00:00:00 2000.06.26 last night. (I wanted to write something analogous to biological clock to refer to my computer’s digital timekeeping, but I couldn’t think of anything good. Does anyone else have an idea here?) At precisely 00:04 I got my first Happy Birthday IM!
I had to then run to a Jiffy Mart; the wonderful world that is Tampa doesn’t have that wacky “No Alcohol Sales After Midnight on Sunday” law that Gainesville does. I jumped in Chris’ monster truck, started the thing, began to back out of the driveway, and then freaked as the vehicle died! All of a sudden it just shut down, kaput. My brain took a few seconds to understand this and by then I was hanging ass-end into the San Pedro Street and halfway in the driveway, blocking the sidewalk. After about twenty minutes of trying to restart her, having the alarm go on and off, accidentally hitting the horn, grunting, pushing, calling Chris to figure out how to get the damn hood open, straining, pushing, and nuttiness, I was able to back the Acura out of the driveway (It had been blocked in by the truck and I had to make a 75-point turn to get it into the street, after – sorry! – driving across my neighbor’s lawn at 1 am!) and get Chris’ Chevy 4000-pound-Z-71-with-monster tires-and-a-15-inch-lift-kit back to where it was out of the road.
I have a new scar to show for my troubles, apparently, as there is a grill mark on my shoulder this morning that I can’t explain. I got into the Acura and drove to Jiffy Mart #1, closed. Jiffy Mart #2, closed. Jiffy Mart #3, closed. I had to drive all the way to the highway before I found an open convenience store. (Gary Larson had a laugh-out-loud Far Side about an inconvenience store that always cracks me up.)
When I finally got home at 1:30 am there was another Happy Birthday IM waiting for me. Woo hoo! I WANT HAPPY BIRTHDAY LOVIN’ FROM EVERYONE! I went into a little blogging frenzy for a bit, had some thrillingly exciting IM conversations, and generally was completely unproductive for several hours. I got up this morning and have been working on – of all things – work stuff, while I wait for the Time Warner guy to visit and connect me to the eNormously fast RoadRunner cable internet service, for the towing guy to come take Chris’ truck to the dealership for repair, for the mailman to bring me all the wonderful birthday presents I better get today, and for the fact that I am now I dirty old man to sink in. (Where I was previously simply a dirty man and where I used to still be concerned about ending sentences with prepositions and not writing dependent adverbial clauses as if they were complete sentences.)
Oh, and did I mention that today is my birthday?
