Magical Mystery Tour

It's been an interesting couple of days...

Wednesday night as I'm leaving work, I'm on the phone with RedFaery making dinner plans when I smell the most horrible smell. Kind of a blend of burning tires and 3-day old decomposing body (I'm guessing here). I pass by a professional lawn mower riding behind his machine on that rolling surfboard thing - something I've always envied cause it looks like fun - and hope that the smell is coming from it.

A few seconds later, smoke starts rolling out of my defrost vents into the car. Oy! I've known that the blower motor has been bad on my Taurus since I bought it last June, but up to a week ago it still worked on the high setting. It had stopped, and I was going to get it replaced after the next bonus check, but I never turned it off - oops!

I drive to the Ford dealership/servicecenter and leave it to be worked on the next day, and RedFaery picked me up and went out to eat. I'd already called into work to take a personal day, expecting the repairs to take a while.

Just for the motor and a new flashing to prevent water from dripping onto it (the reason it went out to begin with) was $500. And as usual, they found a myriad of other problems they they could take care of "for the low, low price of about $200 each problem". Since I don't shit Benjamins, I'm holding off on those.

Last night was the Eddie Izzard concert - a big frivolous expense that we both needed. We ordered tix right after RedFaery was laid off, when we knew we'd still have money - glad we did, because if we waited we would have decided against going.

RedFaery introduced me to Eddie a couple of years back, and is always mystified that I fall asleep during his DVDs. It's not Eddie, it's the British accent. The only time it's not acted like Sominex to my system is Doctor Who, Torchwood, and Coupling.

However, I stayed awake just fine during the concert. One thing RedFaery made a great observation about Eddie's style of humor - to "get" him, you have to know history and religion very well. I liked that when Eddie was struggling to remember the next sequence he'd planned on talking about that he'd do a little dance and play with the audience a bit. Considering he was on stage for nearly two hours and managed to keep us all enthralled the entire time, that's friggin' impressive!

Finally, at about 5:40am this morning, we were both awakened by the earthquake that hit southern Illinois. The loud bang knocked me out of deep sleep, and the vibrations I could feel for about 2 minutes after the fact. A CD fell off a shelf, but otherwise no other damage. I turned to RedFaery and said, "I think that was an earthquake!". Her response, "I thought you had a seizure!" That makes me giggle...

My parents had very minor damage, and an antique wooden Santa in the Santa Claus museum broke an arm. My sister (frequent anonymous poster to this blog) lost a glass stovetop when cutlary fell onto it from the top of the refrigerator, so they faired the worst of us.

This is the first earthquake I actually remember - appearently I've been thru several and remained oblivious. I enjoy new experiences, but don't feel the need to experience that again.