When I say that today will be like a game of "Moon Patrol", I don't mean that I will drive a purple car madly across a yellow dirted pasture, jumping and shooting the whole way. It's more that the entire time I'm in motion, the same 8 bars of enthusiastically simple music will be running through my head. Boop boop BOOP, boo-boop, bee boooo boo boop, etc. I anticipate an early morning, followed by TireQuest, then ConfCall, then perhaps a bunch of Work(tm), which will take a while. After I can't Work anymore, I'm off to find clothes suitable for wearing at a wedding in Hawaii, then I must put the final touches on the song I have just produced for Mr. Yuck, and burn 8 copies onto CDRs (during this period I will be packing my luggage... oh yeah. Put "buy luggage" in the schedule before now.), then put most of those CDs in the hands of the promotional dudes. Boop boop BEEP bee boop bee booo boooo boop

TireQuest - the search for rubber donuts. Friday, after getting one of my fog lamp assemblies replaced (could really have used that extra fog lamp coming down Chinook Pass (thursday)), I drove home and backed into the driveway as usual. I heard a slight thwipping noise coming from the rear left side, but figured I just scraped against something flexible. Saturday, after making a short trip up Capitol Hill to deliver a CD I noticed a strange sidewards movement in the rear and made a mental note to check tire pressure. I stopped at QFC to get a sandwich, and when I returned, a couple parking next to my car notified me that my rear left tire was flat. Oh, so it was. I did my first ever tire change in the parking lot of QFC, right then. The power of the car jack amazes me. I can pick up the side of my 3800 lb. station wagon with just a little screw and lever!

After returning home, I called a nearby garage for help. They weren't open, but said they could probably fix it anyway, since everyone was there and the door was open. The mechanic pulled the thing that had punctured my tire out. It looked like a very thin rifle bullet casing - hollow, brass, and conical at the end. The hole in the middle had contributed to the tire's rapid deflation. Unfortunately, the plug they attempted to repair it with did not stop the leak. They referred me to Firestone, who derided the use of plugs, took the tire off the rim to attempt a patch, and then declared it unfixable - the sidewall had been damaged by my driving on it, and there was now a long slash up the inside of the tire. Doops. I was pissed - I just got 3 new tires like a month ago! Excepting the front left, which was in reasonably okay shape, though only 70% tread compared to the others. Then I remembered that during servicing, front left had become rear left. I had managed to destroy the only old tire on my car. Whew. Boy, talking about tires is kind of dull. The interesting part, I guess, was me walking down the street to the garage wearing leather gloves and carrying a car wheel. People didn't really stare - they just got out of the way.

One kind of cool thing: When I was talking to my mom about buying tires, she asked how much they were. "These particular tires run about $200 each," I admitted. "Wowww, how come so expensive?" she asked. "Well, I'm not sure. Maybe it's because they're from Italy. Made with italian rubber or something, I dunno." "Italy?!" she replied, "Are those Pirelli tires?" "Yeah, they are," I said, "how did you know?" She said, "Your Dad always put Pirelli tires on his MG. They were soooo expensive." Hah! High five, Dad!

Other amusing activites on my plate include learning UML (which I was doing just now, but then got distracted by the keyboard), making my house fit for guests, and destroying the wart on my finger. The wart is the most long-term of these projects. I've had it since that first gig at the Fast Zone, 4 or 5 years ago. Some warts disappear by themselves in a year or two, but not this one! I've tried cutting it off with scissors in the past, but that just created a large red mess leaking all over my wrist and palm (bad time to discover I had no band-aids). This time, I'm doing it insane-scientist style - burning it off with acid! Using a 17% salicylic acid solution, I'm progressively turning the layers of skin and wart into layers of dead stuff, which I then either scrub off with an emery board, or hack off in thin layers with an X-acto knife (roast beef style), depending on how macho I'm feeling at the time. Apparently this must be kept up for quite a while to get good results. I'm prepared. I don't seem to have any other warts anywhere (but it was fun looking for them), so I'm guessing this wart isn't that contagious. At least, it wasn't. Maybe it was ensconced under a layer of containing epidermis, and now that I've foolishly burnt it down with Dr. Scholl's Clear Away(tm), it will rampage, err, all over my skin! Alas, woe, and yucko! Actually, something tells me this wart will do nothing but die a slow and ashy death, sealed in a pocket of adhesive cloth and distilled zit medicine.