Thursday,
January 10, 2002

Flat on my back

And not in a fun way. I think my body finally decided that working eight straight days at a stretch with no break was enough, and decided to pull a coup. Of course, said coup occurred in the middle of last night and required me to spend large amounts of time in the bathroom. Yeah, one of those. Bleah.

So I fired off an email to all the pertinent people this morning and crawled back into my bed of pain to fall into a gut-tossed and seriously dehydrated slumber. Somewhere around 4:30 PM, I woke up feeling wonderful. Go figure.

At least this means it isn't some sort of stomach bug, which could have played havoc with my plans for the weekend. As it was, the Man from McKinney called in the afternoon to find out how I was doing ("Just wanted to make sure you weren't in a car accident or anything -- uh, you're still on for babysitting Saturday night, right?") Nope, I'm fine, and I plan on doing some relaxing, fun stuff this weekend, too, in between cleaning our pit of an apartment and babysitting on Saturday. There's an antique market that's calling my name, and dammit, I intend to answer its call.

He doan need no steenkin' ESCAPE

"I think I'm buying a Jeep Grand Cherokee," Lyndon informed me.

"Oh?" I responded politely. The last time we'd discussed this, he was looking at a canary-yellow Ford Escape (he wanted yellow because it was the most noticeable color, and it might cut down on the percentage of people trying to pull into a space that he was already occupying). I already knew he was getting an SUV of one stripe or another, much to the Man from McKinney's despair.

"Well, it turns out one of the guys at work is going back to Holland, and needs to sell his Cherokee. It's a 1993 model, but I had it checked out today by a testing facility and they said it was in beautiful condition. Besides, it's only $5,000, and I'd feel a hell of a lot more comfortable driving a cheap used car instead of some expensive new one, in case I ding anything."

I could see the logic behind this -- there's no guarantee that I'll be working past February, and while he has a decent salary it would be something of a strain to be paying out on two new car payments. So tomorrow he'll be consulting with my insurance agent to see if the GC can be put on our existing car insurance, then forwarding the paperwork to the credit union so that they can start doing the title search. Once everything is done and dusted, he should be able to pick up a loan check on Wednesday morning and take possession of the car by Wednesday afternoon.

And then Lyndon will be the proud owner of his very first car, at the tender age of 37. He's already talking about tearing out the radio and installing a CD player and custom speakers in the doors and underneath the seats, "for cruising purposes. If I have to deal with Dallas traffic, I'm going to do it with Mozart playing on a quality sound system."

You go, boy.