Previously on Star Trek: Voyager...

The title of this one might be a little confusing as I already covered all the RainFurrest stuff in my last journal. For those of you still interested in hearing about the trip though, here's everything that didn't fit.

And now the conclusion:

And so once again I packed up and moved on. I flew Southwest this time. I've never had much reason to prefer one airline over another, really. I'd fly on a kite if it saved me $50. I like Southwest's style though. No baggage fees, and no assigned seating either. Much as I enjoy having a window seat, it's just quite a relief from all the waiting, hassle and inconvenience of travel when they are just like "Where's your seat? Who cares! There are 85 people and 85 seats, just sit the fuck down we've got shit to do!" Yes it's not very organized, but when every other airline organizes their boarding in the most inefficient way possible it's not like they have competition. "Hey, let's board front-to-back to put as many people in the way as we can! And then we'll board one zone at a time to concentrate the movement of people all into the same place so that 80% of the plane has no activity whatsoever and is just wasted space, and 20% of the plane is crammed with boarders all stepping on each other to clamor to their seats!" Yeah, suddenly aircraft musical chairs doesn't sound so unreasonable.

In any case, having a lot of contacts to coordinate and no concrete plan came back to bite me when I got into Austin. When I told my friend from San Antonio (Travis) that Lucius couldn't make it for a few hours after I got in, he said that he'd be able to pick me up from the airport. We met up and went to Taco Cabana. "Mexican McDonalds" as it was described to me. I'd say that analogy matches Taco Bell, and this place was a notch or two above Taco Bell. It's probably the proximity to actual Mexico that does it. In any case, it was good to touch base with him and hear what he's been up to. Of course, this meetup put us at a non-airport location that Lucius didn't know how to get to. We had only driven a few minutes away, but it was still an adventure trying to direct Lucius to us by phone. Especially when none of the three of us knew the area too well. He was eventually directed to us by a helpful hippie along the road. He informed me that his polite solicitation for directions went something like "Hey hippie! Where's Taco Cabana at?" I suppose I can't fault him for the usage, as it did get him to the desired location.

We talked it over for a moment, and decided that staying in Austin was easiest since we were there already. Travis had a smartphone, so we asked it about local brewery tours and a few other attractions. Every destination that we tried led us to something that was closed, or didn't exist and was just some random location in the middle of a nasty ghetto. Or something that was closed and in the middle of a nasty ghetto. Eventually we just went with at trip to Sixth Street where all the bars are. It worked, blunt as it was. I don't know why I bother planning things. It seems like my friends always just end up going out and drinking anyway.

Sixth Street was actually pretty nice. It really is just solid bars and restaurants all the way down, so bar-hopping on foot is actually quite practical. I'd even go so far as fun. There was such a wealth of options that it was actually possible to just keep walking until we found a bar that precisely matched my entirely unreasonable ideal bar characteristics: 1. No music blaring so loud that I can hear it clearly out in the street, and 2. No one standing outside the door yelling out the prices of drinks inside. Those are two practices I will gladly go out of my way to discourage. We all started off buying rounds alternately and got a pretty solid buzz going before our priorities diverged. I've never been or so much as claimed to be a drinker, and Lucius made it sound like he had a bit of an edge on me in that arena, but Travis was indisputably our superior. He had the most to drink and was by far the least drunk. He really didn't show it at all that I could see. I switched to water around drink six and Lucius was close behind me. I think I hit the nail on the head though with that switch. I kept getting drunker for an improbably long time after tapping out, but I never fell or puked or any of the other marks of excess. I was having fun the whole time, so I'd call it a successful night of drinking.

Travis got on this kick about finding bars with outdoor terraces, so we got to climb a whole bunch of stairs. I don't have too much baseline to make an objective conclusion about it, but maybe physical activity really does help metabolize alcohol. Travis must do this a lot, because he never slowed down for a second. Most of the night was the two of us literally chasing after him as he proceeded to wherever he was going at the time. At the point where I was really wondering why I wasn't sobering up just yet we found one of Travis' highly sought after terrace bars. We were fortunate in that this one had couches because Lucius and I both really needed a quick horizontal break to get our shit together.

Even as skewed as my perceptions were, I could tell that we had really been spending a lot of time up there. We were fortunate in that the three flights of stairs up to our present perch did seem to be repelling any other customers. We were nearly alone up there, but it must've taken a very understanding bartender to let us host our little recovery session up there for all that time. After recharging for something like an hour we started to get back to our feet. I recall that I couldn't resist breaking it down on the dance floor when Harder, Faster, Better, Stronger by Daft Punk came on the house speakers. As I was busting a move or two I remembered thinking "Goddamn, I look completely retarded." At long last a sign that I was sobering up again. A few more stops and we took our leave of the place. Travis said to let us know if we were in town again and we bid him goodnight.

We covered the distance back to Lucius' place with relative ease. I noted that once he got back onto the familiar surface streets near his place he was a lot more comfortable with the twists and turns, and set himself to seeing if he could roll the truck on a number of them. The answer? No. But I applaud his efforts. I had gotten regular updates on the status of his roughly 70% of a house leading up to my arrival, and what I found was perfectly functional in my opinion. Cold shower with no flooring in the bathroom was something of an issue, but I can deal with just about anything in the short term. The cot he had out for me was a bit precarious, but it was 3 AM and I was dead on my feet. I would've slept on the concrete by then.

Friday we had the option of dropping into San Antonio to see Travis again. It was a hell of a drive, about 3 hours under ideal conditions (which even here never happen), but I was nudged in the direction of that option by the fact that I left my jacket in Travis' car. I was quite thankful that I bought it when I was in the sopping mess that was Washington, but seeing as it got noticeably hotter whilst flying over Texas, I jettisoned it at my earliest opportunity and neglected to keep track of it past that point. I might've made too big a deal out of it, but that jacket was something I bought in Dubai while I was on deployment so there's some sentimentality attached to it, and of course it would be quite an imposition to replace it.

And so, off we went on our incredible journey. Lucius had asked me to bring along some manner of music player so that I could DJ for such inevitable long drives. I loaded a bunch of off-handed selections onto my MP3 player, about three gigabytes worth. I thought it would be overkill, but we made it through about 2/3 of the songs in the course of the trip. Our taste in songs actually matched surprisingly well. The Trans-Siberian Orchestra and String Quartet covers went over pretty well, and he was intrigued by Alestorm. He was incredulous at first when I described them as "Pirate speed metal" but he quickly learned the accuracy and true awesomeness of that descriptor. We actually swapped notes about musicians a bit after the fact. I was surprised at how long it took him to comment on it when a My Little Pony song came on. His reaction was… unique, like many of his opinions.
"Yeah what I was doing then was- what is going on? What's coming out of my radio it's like a bunch of squirrels arguing what just happened?"

We found an interesting new stretch of toll road with a speed limit of 85 MPH. That was both interesting and time-saving. We drove almost all the way through San Antonio on our way, which was a unique experience. The design of their highway interchanges looks like what you'd get if you asked an impressionist painter to design it instead of a civil engineer. We worked out a spot to meet up with Travis and then proceed on to parts unknown. Travis had this place he wanted to meet a few family members at, so we proceeded there. Not that we necessarily knew where "there" was. Again, putting our faith in the smartphone got us nowhere.

Fortunately I was co-pilot so I didn't have to worry about driving while trying to communicate with outer space and eventually got the device to cough up some valid directions. Unfortunately the bridge that it meant for us to cross was closed and our device stubbornly refused to tell us an alternate means to get there. My sarcastic suggestion of "go west for a bit and then try to find a road that crosses water at some point" ended up being not only implemented, but successfully so. We had to navigate around several more closed roads in order to end up at yet another closed road in order to arrive at the conclusion that our destination was bordered on all sides by closed roads and we'd have to walk. Apparently this "One road at a time" or "confine work to one lane" nonsense used by other states' transportation departments isn't efficient enough for Texas. It appears that there the best way to get the job done is to tear up huge swaths of roadway as if a giant had scooped the asphalt up in big swaths, leaving entire intersections and neighborhoods impassable, and then close up shop for the weekend. Git R done.

We came upon our target, an odd setup that seemed right at home in the midst of this crater. It was a courtyard of sorts, surrounded by food vendors and beer tents. We were the only ones that seemed at all perturbed by 90s platformer game style of obstacles one had to overcome to get to it, as the crowd there was quite thick. They were having an Oktoberfest promotion, so it was all things German all around. In any case, we found the group that Travis was there to see. They had Air Force and Army retirees in their number, so we had a pretty good all-branch showing there. I had once more played the naive fool and made plans for the day. I found a cinema-café nearby that I thought we might go to. I've always liked the idea of combining a restaurant and a theater so I figured we'd go for it.

We had blown a lot of time traversing the labyrinth to get to where we were, and we burned even more disentangling ourselves from the table we were at and navigating the crowd to get out of there. By the time we made it to the theater they had sold out. My folly for trying to direct this expedition into some kind of coherent direction I suppose. Who am I to tell the chips where to fall? In any case, we hadn't eaten in anticipation of doing so at the movie, and we'd already paid our covercharge back at studio Deutschland, so I suggested that we head back there. We got back there and had a big, suitably German meal and all was well. Travis kept going on and on about how he wanted to show us the River Walk, another destination of indeterminate distance that he didn't quite know how to get to. And of course he said that everything was packed this time of night, so there wouldn't be any place closer to park. That meant walking the whole way. I still went along with it as, in principle, I liked taking long walks through cities, particularly those with history to them. And of course, this city has the only part of Texas history anyone has actually heard about.

So in that decision, I underestimated a few things. My physical exhaustion at the time, how far we were from where we needed to be, the complexities of San Antonio's city design, how bloody freaking hot[i/] it stayed there at night, and Travis' ability to somehow never have any idea what the fuck despite being in the city [i]he was born in. We walked something like three or four miles, straight line distance, not counting all the turnarounds to figure out where we were going. Late at night, ill and under temperature stress are not the ideal conditions to be under while performing such an expedition. We came across a gypsy sale of sorts along the way. Nothing much of interest but they had $2 bottled water. Not something I'm normally taken in by, but right then I would've bought some $25 bottled water.

And so we plodded on, in search of some something or other the details of which I had forgotten about or never knew in the first place. That was the worst part, really. If he knew, or at the very least appeared to know what the fuck was going on, it probably wouldn't have been all that bad. Had we been making true, measurable progress I might've been able to tough it out. As it was, we had an unknown and thus possibly infinite distance to whatever our destination was, which is only slightly more motivating than endlessly walking in circles. Eventually, by accident I think, we came across an entrance to the Riverwalk. It was an interesting thing, really. The river comes through the town at about 20 feet below the current street level, so there's this open-air underground development that's sprung up around it. Had I been in a less exasperated mood, I might've enjoyed myself, and given the effort involved in getting there I rather regret having not done so.

We walked about though this rather surreal villa that looked a bit like someone had buried a shopping mall which was then gradually uncovered by water erosion. It was a bit tougher to find a good place to sit and have a drink, but that was true of San Antonio in general. I was surprised at what a fundamental difference in layout there was between the two neighboring cities. Where was sixth street? In-between 5th and 7th, you twit! How was it organized? Everything you want all in the same place. Simple, functional, brilliant. I was astonished to learn that this sensible layout butted right up against the mangled slurry of gibbering insanity that is San Antonio. There was an intersection between five roads that had about 130 degrees worth of no roads with the others jammed into the remainder of the circle. That was one of the roads that the pavement golem had chewed up and left in ruins. Not so that it could be redesigned, but so that it could be (eventually) repaved in exactly the same configuration such that this Gaelic rune shape might be preserved indefinitely. These roads look like they were planned out on MS Paint without the ability to use any of the line or shape tools. While wearing mittens.

Another bizarre phenomenon that I encountered in the city was the idea of randomly interspersing bars into residential areas. We'd be walking through a big, densely populated housing development and I'd start to wonder why until I noticed that there was a bunch of houses and then a bar all of a sudden. A bar that admittedly looked like it used to be someone's house, but still, that's just weird! Who does that? I'd heard multiple times about how, despite being the capital of Texas, Austin is nothing like the real Texas. Well I guess I must really hate the "real" Texas because I thought Austin was great!

In any case, we made our way to a restaurant that didn't have a cover charge and did have a nice looking bar. It really was a nice place to sit down, have a drink and sit down for while. Also we got to sit down at the bar after walking a really long time. I cautioned Travis against his idea of getting something to eat there. "Well, the menu doesn't list prices, and judging by how you've begged gas money from me twice already, I'm guessing that this place is a bit beyond your means." We sat around for a bit, and talked with a nice young girl who was in town for a conference. Just winding down for a bit in general. As long as our journey felt, it was only about 10:30 by the time we were talking about moving on.

I hated to be the wet blanket and ask to just leave, but there were too many variables. Now that we had wandered around underground a bit, I was certain that Travis had no idea where we were anymore, much less how to navigate us back to his car. And we had to drive back to his place. AND we had to drive from there back out into farm country where Lucius lives. No telling how long that would all take. I notice that it's often not a good thing when I'm right…

Sure enough, we wandered about with the decisiveness of an army ant in a hot frying pan for quite awhile before coming up with some manner of coherent direction. We did come across the Alamo in the course of that random diaspora, and I did look at it, but that was plenty enough for me. I was still in "get me the hell out of this city" mode. We got ourselves back onto the long trundle to the car. Turns out that it wasn't just perspective, we had actually walked a very long way to get there. We piled in and made for Travis' place, I said my last goodbyes to him and we were off into the night once more.

Of course then it was put upon Lucius to drive the three hours back to his house. I do kind of feel bad about all that. I'm sure he had just as little fun as I did, but he had to do a lot of work also. I was not handling the strain of this trip well, but I was free to spend most of the rides in a significantly reduced state of consciousness. A privilege that I took liberal advantage of. It was a combination of a number of factors that led to me being a somewhat inconsiderate guest. For one, it was stupid hot in Texas if I hadn't made mention of that already. You'd think that living in South Carolina and going on deployment to the Persian Gulf would've prepared me for that sort of thing. It's almost the opposite really. I didn't adapt particularly well at all. After getting back from the Gulf I just thought "Oh my God, fuck ever being hot again as long as I live!" And that's sort of stuck with me. Call it post-heat-stress disorder I guess. It used to be that I'd stick it out for awhile, but now that I've seen the true horror that heat can bring I just throw up my hands and give up the moment I start to sweat. Having no air conditioning in the truck was another big thing that got to me. I can't necessarily blame Lucius. I know how expensive compressors are to fix. Sometimes you can be further ahead replacing the entire car. A length that I would totally be willing to go to, but again, different priorities. Having no refuge from the heat is what really wears me down. Having to go from one cool place to another is something I'm used to, but to just bake for hours is something I apparently wasn't designed for.

It was kind of a perfect storm with the illness, too. Mursa complained a lot about chills while he was sleeping. I suppose I was in the fortunate position of chills being physically impossible since the air was near body temperature anyway. I suppose it probably did throw my thermostat out of whack though, and make me a bit more bitchy about such things. Mursa also talked about his Eustachian tubes being clogged all the time and I got that pretty bad. It made me very sensitive to pressure changes, the sort that happen on quite a frequent basis when you're in a truck that's going 85 with the windows down. It also was probably a big factor in my low tolerance for lost sleep and trudging around very hot cities with asinine street layouts.

I sneezed a lot, too. That's what really started to worry me. I experience nearly all respiratory disease as the same four symptoms. Stuffy nose, sore, throat, and fatigue. A cold is those four for a week. The flu is those four for a couple weeks. Pneumonia is those four for about a month. Mononucleosis is those for like three months. I don't know why that is, it just seems to be how my immune system is configured. I'll have to speak with the manufacturer about it. It makes it maddening to go to the doctor because I never have anything diagnostically useful to report. And then of course they prescribe bed rest and fluids. Well thank God I came to you doc! I was going to run long sprints and dehydrate myself until I felt better. You know that old saying "Exercise a fever, dehydrate a cold" right? Eventually I quit going to doctors for stuff like that. Why would I waste time and money for an exchange that's going to go pretty much like this:
"Well doc, it's the same old crap."
"Ah alright, well do the same old crap. That'll be $140."

About the time Lucius was professing his immunity to such mortal trivialities as disease pathogens was also about the time he started getting sick, so yeah, I think Rhinovirus has developed an understanding of Karma and poetic justice. So if you haven't pieced it all together yet, I got sick from sleeping in the same room as Mursa, gave it to TK when I slept in his room, and then gave it to Lucius when I slept at his place. I guess I should've listened in school when they told me that sleeping with a lot of different people would spread disease… Anyway, I haven't given it to anyone at home here and I'm pretty well over it, so at least my leg of the disease trafficking is done.

The next day we had plans in the opposite direction. My other Navy friend, John, lives near Houston to the East. His schedule was pretty tight, so he only had the weekend to spare. I had figured on spending that weekend with him and his wife and then coming back to Lucius' place since his schedule was a lot lighter later on. I managed to research a restaurant in a town called Hempstead for the handoff. It was chosen based entirely on being roughly halfway to Houston, and as we came to find out, really had no positive qualities other than that. Or any anything other than that. The place gave off that creepy ghost town vibe from all over the place. We eventually found the restaurant that I looked up online, no mean feat due to the fact that it was one of those weird "I'm gonna run this business out of my house for some reason!" places that Texas seems so fond of. I'm even more wary of that model as an eatery than a bar. I checked their hours their site, but the marquee out front said as a special today only they were closed. Just as well.

We looked about the town to come across a number of discouraging finds. Lots of buildings that were difficult to tell if they were abandoned or not. And even if they weren't, the uncertainty there was enough to discount the place. It mirrored another unique Texas paradox. The idea that no matter how desolate or completely in ruins the location is, there will be crowds of cars crawling all over the place like a swarm of insects. This must be what the world of that movie Cars must be like. Lots of empty, crumbling buildings that only serve as waypoints for the new sentient machines wandering the decayed shell of the fallen human civilization. Everywhere we went there were cars on the road, all seeming to be in a perpetual race across the huge expanses of countryside that Texas lays claim to. If there were one place in the world I thought less likely to suffer from overcrowding it would be Texas, but it seems like the design of their infrastructure is catching up with them. The philosophy of "this is the cheapest way to cover the 900 mile gap between here and the next destination" worked for awhile, but now that there are all these people around that seem to do nothing but drive their cars around, all that empty space isn't quite so empty anymore.

We found a chain Mexican restaurant that looked a bit less like a place where we'd get stabbed, and moved the meeting there. Lunch went pretty well. Lucius and I were both quite taken aback by John's astonished and excited response to hearing that Lucius farmed goats out in the country. Apparently he and his wife had been discussing getting a couple goats as pets, so I had unwittingly brought together two people that had quite a bit to talk about. When I saw the neighborhood that he lived in, I recommended that he work on getting the idea past the homeowners' association before he gets too deep in the effort. He admitted that the association has been giving him a lot of grief about stupid stuff, which in my experience, is the purpose of a homeowners' association. Once, he needed some room in the driveway to do some work on the house, so he parked his car a little ways off the driveway in the lawn for awhile. Within a few days, he got a nastygram telling him to move it. It was a certified letter even. That means that it cost them something like $7 to bitch about where he parked his car.

So I got to meet the family, which meant his wife and roughly 60% progress on a kid, and two dogs. They had a toy poodle who was terrified of everything in the world that wasn't John's wife, and an old lab mix that I was instant friends with. That's how labs are most of the time. They're everyone's friend. He insisted on playing tug-of-war with me, and who was I to refuse? We had some time to kill, and so we just about wore each other out doing that. As old as he was, I was impressed that he got me to work up a sweat.

I learned about what exactly made John's schedule so tight as we chatted and caught up on different things. He was working a strenuous full time job as a maintenance technician for an electrical outfit that sold and maintained emergency power supplies. On top of that he was going to college, which he also had to do full time in order to qualify for Montgomery GI Bill benefits. With all that, it wasn't tough to see why this was the first weekend he'd had free in a long time. Hearing about his schedule solidified my resolve to do just college whilst at college. Of course, being a new homeowner with his first free time in weeks meant that he had some work to do around the house. He said that he didn't want to impose on me, but the work needed to be done anyway and it wasn't like I would prefer sitting around doing nothing while he worked on his various tasks. Plus I let him in on a little secret. I actually do like fixing things and working with electrical gear, it was the Navy that had me pissed off the whole time he knew me.

The big item was that the septic system was misbehaving. Apparently there's an evac pump that draws liquid off the top of the septic tank to go to the drainage field. Though it baffled me, I didn't ask exactly why this was the responsibility of a pump and not… gravity, the way it is back home. I was there to troubleshoot the system, not question the design. Apparently he'd gotten a lousy turnover from the person he bought the house from, since he couldn't recall the pump ever working at full capacity. By now it was completely offline and the ground around the septic tank was getting mushy. The septic tech from the agency that installed the system was still under contract from the previous owner. When he got out there to look at it though, he just said that there was no power getting to the system. There was nothing he could do about that, so he said to call back once power was restored. That left figuring out where the electrical interruption was up to us.

He had some test equipment from work and had already done the most obvious things; checked the breaker, checked terminal voltage and connector continuity. There was definitely voltage coming out of the breaker box, but none was getting to the motor controller on the other side. There was a blown relay in the controller box, which was probably why the pump acted up before, but that wouldn't explain the lack of voltage at the input terminals. We fiddled a bit with the overhead light that came off the same underground cableway. He had installed a switch in it recently because it didn't appear to have a way to be turned off before. It really smacked of a half-baked DIY install on the part of the last guy. We were thinking that the underground cable might've been routed in series to save effort, so the new switch might've been breaking that circuit. That would mean a loss of voltage, but not a loss of circuit common on the other end.

We were both used to working with three-phase systems, so we were stuck for a way to distinguish between ground and circuit common without the ability to apply voltage for testing, or a way to get a reference ground to the multimeter. After some head-scratching and even a couple diagrams we determined that the only explanation was a break in the cable underground. We couldn't eliminate it, but we couldn't really prove it either. I doubted his ability to appropriate a time-domain reflectometer from work to narrow down the location of the break. Nor did have enough test cable to do a resistance check to look for continuity in the cable to confirm that there even was a break. Such certainty would've been nice, as it was not a pleasant conclusion. Replacing the cable meant not just digging up dirt, but destroying and re-pouring the driveway as well, since the cable ran under the concrete. The less onerous but still imperfect solution was to buy several yards worth of tough, expensive outdoor cable and run it along the ground.

Naturally the dog wandered off in the course of all this intensive troubleshooting, so we had to drop everything when John's wife came out to ask where the dog was. They took off down the street to start asking neighbors and I walked across the lawn in the other direction. It took me just a minute or two to find him and he came right over to me when I called. You know, because we're bros. We took a bit of a break inside since we were sweaty from the work out front. I lavished attention on the dog while we thought over our predicament. John was jealous that his dog preferred me. I just said that the dog must've been a good judge of character.

Back outside I was looking things over one more time to see if there was something I was missing. I followed the cableway from the breaker box down to the ground as I'd done before, vainly hoping that looking at it more thoroughly would provide me some new insight. When I was digging through the bushes, I came across a rotary switch mounted to the side of the house. I'd done plenty of dummy checks to verify John's work by that point, so I figured one more wouldn't hurt.
"John, I'm not trying to make you look stupid here, but have you checked this switch?"
"I've… never seen that switch before, actually."
"Well it's way over here and there's no reason that it would have anything to do with our problem, but it is off right now."
"Alright, I'll check input voltage at the motor controller and you hit it."

With leery anticipation, I turned the switch. Far from a simple change in voltage, I heard the pump spinning up as soon as it clicked to 'ON'. We both cried out at this Eureka revelation, with such force that his wife thought one of us had electrocuted ourselves. We had traced the wire from the breaker to the cableway that went down into the ground. That's what got us thinking that the pump controller was just like the light, no switch or cutoff, just straight wired to the breaker. But, because this is Texas and making sense is for damn Yankees, the wire didn't go down into the ground and then proceed to its destination. It went from the breaker box down into the ground, then several feet in the opposite direction along the house, and then back out of the ground up along the foundation into an innocuous and well-hidden rotary switch box, which then proceeded to its destination. That was the hangup that had us mystified the entire time.

We savored our victory as the evening wound down, and when dusk came, John busted out his new telescope that he'd hardly ever had the time to use. It was far from an ideal night for it. Lots of trees, clouds threatening, and a bizarre amount of light pollution. Lucius noticed it the night before when we were driving home, a lot of scattered white light on the horizon with no apparent source, particularly as far away from civilization as we were. It was like that again when we were using the telescope. Silhouettes were stark against the paradoxically bright sky. What is up with your skies, Texas? The only thing that I could think of was that the Moon might be really close to the horizon and might be diffusing light up into the sky.

The telescope had a really fancy stellar mapping function, but it required us to pinpoint specific stars as reference points. I could identify a handful of them even though the change in latitude threw me off. Thank God Orion was up or we would've been pretty sunk. The real problem was that though the telescope made a lot more stars visible, it was astonishingly hard to distinguish exactly which star in the viewfield was the naked-eye visible star that we were trying to use as a landmark. For whatever reason nearly all the stars through the telescope had the same apparent brightness. The cloudcover came over before we managed to get the fancy astral orienteering system aligned, but it was high time that we turn in by then anyway.

The next day started off slowly, just the way I like it. The plan had been to take the dog for a walk, but apparently our vigorous activity the previous day had pushed his old bones a bit too far. He whined when he got up and was reluctant to move. They got him some aspirin and he improved, but it was still probably best for him to stay home. Still, it was a nice day for a walk, so we went for one out in a nearby national park. Thanks to the government shutdown, it was closed. This one however, did not have the wherewithal to bar people from walking in it the way others did. So I guess technically we were trespassing or something? Well, it was the most scenic and relaxing misdemeanor that I was ever a part of.

The afternoon was padded out with some of John's calculus homework that made me realize that I really should brush up on that sort of thing before I barrel headlong into it in college. I was embarrassed that I had forgotten what a Secant was, but I'm sure everyone has experienced that feeling at some point. Later on, we went out to see Runner, Runner. It was a pretty solid movie. It was a lot like 21, just with even higher stakes and probably not based on a true story. It was immersive and dynamic, good characters too. I guess the good and the bad are both that it was quite inoffensive. They didn't really take any risks, so they ended up with a very good, but ultimately unremarkable movie.

Later on I got the tour of the house and got to look through all of John's knickknacks. He's a collector of sorts, and so everything he had in there had a story behind it. There was a near century-old book that passed through the hands of the Hoover family (as in president Hoover), a family of bronze eagles that were saved during the closure of a defunct foundry upstate, and a number of other interesting things. I was astonished to find an old-fashioned metal slide rule in there, which had the best story of all. It was a gift from a friend's father. He said that the father meant for his son to have it, but he would much rather it go to someone it would have meaning for. He said that John was the type of man that he'd rather his son had turned out as. It wasn't long after that that he died. Heavy stuff.

By then it was about time for another meetup with everyone's favorite goat farmer. This time John's wife came along. She was excited to talk shop with Lucius as well. For his part, Lucius responded to his newfound celebrity with grace and humility, being quite attentive in answering his new fans' questions. I encouraged them to keep in touch after my departure seeing as they're so coincidentally well suited for each other. In any case, we parted ways and made it back to the apparently very interesting goat farm. That night was, for once, an early one and I got an appreciable amount of sleep.

Lucius had to go in to take a test that morning, but that was all well and good. For once I didn't have plans for the day. He asked if I'd just like to hang out at the house or just like… go to college with him for some reason. I wasn't sure what I was going to do there, but I picked go to college with him for some reason. He asked a couple times if I'd be okay just wandering around the campus for awhile. I figured that I'm 24, I haven't shaved in a long time, I'm wearing a t-shirt and jeans, I'm in a place I've never been before and I lack focus and direction. I think I'm ideally suited to blending in on a college campus. So, Lucius ran off to take that test, and I went in a different direction to do whatever it was that I thought I was doing.

It was finally something that I would call a nice day, as it had cooled off markedly during my weekend in Houston, so I was actually quite glad for the chance to walk around outside a bit. I did manage to find an ATM, which was useful, given that I'd used up most of the nearly $300 cash I'd started with, and because they seem to be a bit short on Navy Federal Credit Unions this far inland. I got to have a good long walkabout and have a look at all the different campus amenities. I was proud to have learned the place well enough in that time to give someone else directions. He had the fortune of asking about something that was 200 yards away and I had just walked past. To my credit, I did pretty much as I pleased the whole way and not once did anyone ask for my student ID or yank off my Scooby Doo villain disguise and shout "Aha! You're not a college student at all! You're just a regular unemployed, listless manchild! I knew it all along!"

My campus hike ended in the library with me sitting down and working on my novel for a bit. Before long Lucius called and we met up again, keeping the lack of direction or objective though. It was once again a time for Lucius to chauffer me through the whimsically nonsensical Texas roadway infrastructure. "Hey, ya know what's a great place for hairpin turns? Off ramps! Yeee-HAW!" I bought him a tank of gas to help defray the expense of ferrying me about like this, not that it was too much of an imposition. Texas makes it very clear that they've got all the oil down there. When we were driving by stations advertising $3.00 gas I just thought "Wow, is it 2008 already? Well I'll be damned."

The first destination I came up with when the need for such things arose was the Bluebell Creamery. I knew it was in the general area and I've heard that they do good work. There were lots of tours of the factory and merchandise to buy, but I wasn't much for all that. I grew up on a dairy farm, so I have quite a solid grasp of what's going on behind those doors, and it's not nearly as magical as you'd think it is. I was just there for the ice cream. I got a very foreboding warning while I was picking my flavor that since I didn't go on the tour my treat would cost a dollar a scoop. A dollar a scoop? A whole dollar! What kind of inhumane extortion racquet were they running in there? I bought two. Really the painful part of the ordeal was waiting in line behind a bunch of indecisive people who were apparently passing their lack of focus and poor decision-making skills down to their large flock of children. "Hmmm, can I sample that one too? Oh! That one's very sweet!" It's CAKE FLAVORED ICE CREAM! The fuck did you think it was gonna taste like? In any case, Bluebell does indeed know what they're doing, and it was absolutely worth the trip.

I remembered that Lucius had a barbeque joint that he wanted me to try, so we headed there next. It was good eats. I should try having dessert first more often. I found a great sauce there that I really wanted to take with me, but they only sold it in cheap Styrofoam containers. That wouldn't fly, so we moved on. We had run out of destinations by then, so we wandered for a bit before settling on seeing a movie. The showtimes weren't ideal, so we had a bit more time to kill before the late one. I settled on coming up with some kind of more resilient container and obtaining barbeque sauce. Wal-Mart for once failed me by lacking mason jars, but we found some at a hobby shop. I got my pint of sauce and we were still an hour or so in advance of the showing.

It might've seemed like a lot of effort to go through to get some sauce, but we had the time to spare and I really wanted to have some of this stuff. It was a mustard-based sauce. The difference between it and anything else I've ever tried with mustard in it was that this actually tasted good. For me, that was a hitherto completely unheard-of characteristic of mustard, and I wanted some verification of this being possible, if only to prove it to myself. I wanted to have some of this stuff to prove to the other, lesser forms of mustard that they were capable of so much more. I wanted something to rub in mustard's face and say "Why are you not this, mustard? Why do you exist in any other form? Why do you continue to persist in a world where this is a thing! WHY?" Yes, I entertained the idea of yelling at mustard and attempting to make it feel bad about itself. It's a very useful stand-in for more destructive forms of insanity. I'm starting to wish I got more of the stuff, actually. My mom loves it. She's used it in three dinners so far since I got back.

In any case, seeing a relatively late showing at a still-very-far-away theater was not an ideal plan for a night where we have to get up early the next morning to make my flight. Lucius wasn't sure on it, but I gambled on our ability to spot a closer theater along the way back, and that such a hypothetical theater would have more amiable showtimes. We got sort of what we were looking for as a result of my rolling the dice. They didn't have We're the Millers like I'd originally planned on, but Gravity was in a much more usable timeslot. It was a fancy 3D IMAX theater, so I figured that all the space particle-effect wizardry would be at its best there. I'm sure you all know how that went.

In any case, we made it back with enough time for at least a functional amount of sleep before I had to be to the airport. Apparently stupid-early flights are a common thing at Austin-Bergstrom, because while other airports had their checkin desks closed when I got in this early to them, Austin airport was already bustling with activity, with substantial lines at both checkin and security. I was actually starting to sweat a little about the time crunch in the security line. I'd packed the MP3 player that Lucius had suggested I bring inside a metal tin that rolls of Air Particulate Detector filter paper come in. The TSA must've thought that was a really nifty idea because they were always asking to see that thing. I think they found it more conspicuous than my propensity towards cross-country biological warfare and trafficking in unlicensed barbeque sauce.

I had the fortune of being at a terminal that was close to the security checkpoint, so I made it ten minutes in advance of boarding. A comfortable margin despite my earlier worry, but you really don't want to cut it much closer than that these days. It wasn't any too long before I was homeward bound. I really hope I never reach a point where I fly so much that the feeling of taking off in a jet aircraft becomes anything other than totally awesome. A lot of people that I meet on a plane do this sort of thing all the time and have been numbed to it such that they just sort of trudge through the process. Me? I'm always trying to get a window seat and I'm always trying to see outside because flying is really freaking cool.

I always hear people complaining about logistical problems and delays like they're the worst thing in the world. "Aw man, my takeoff was delayed by 45 minutes! Bullshit!" Oh? Oh, so you had to sit at the terminal and enjoy the free wifi for an extra 45 minutes, hm? And then what happened? Did you FLY? Did you leap from the ground in a superhuman feat that people just a few generations ago would've called freaking magic? Did you, an ordinary citizen, board one of the greatest technological achievements in the history of mankind and leap into the sky the way ancient people imagined their gods did? Did you traverse a distance in that once took several months, an entire life's savings and had a 20% mortality rate? Did all of those wonderful, miraculous things happen to you for nothing but a few weeks' pay in a matter of hours you ungrateful little shit? Where do you get off expecting absolute perfection out of the people that are pretty much already moving heaven and earth to accommodate you?

And another thing, I really hate it when people call everyone surviving a plane crash "a miracle". That implies that if not for the intervention of a higher power, everyone would've died horribly. Bullshit! Commercial airline crashes have an absolutely staggering 96% survival rate. And the crashes themselves are also mind-bogglingly rare. The Air Asiana flight that crashed in July and killed three people was all over the news. What the media tended to gloss over was that these were the first commercial airline fatality since 2001. That's over a decade of an absolutely flawless safety record. God isn't helpfully shepherding every one of those flights back to the ground. That is the result of advanced and conscientious design of the aircraft, and the hard work, training and dedication of our pilots and flightcrews. No one gets into aviation for the money, because the world is full of broke-ass jobless passengers like me who pick their flight solely on who can put the lowest number on the ticket next to the dollar symbol. People work in aviation, people fly, because they love to fly, and because they want to bring that magic to others. It's a wonderful, amazing thing and I really wish I had forms of passion other than anger with which to express it!

I got to watch a long, brilliant sunrise on my flight out. I've always cursed sunrises for happening at "Oh sweet Jesus why am I awake?" O'clock in the morning, but damned if they aren't inspiring. No poem this time, but as always I had my novel to work on. I had to look up what the big "SNJE" flag on my next boarding pass meant. "Serviced by Non-Jet Equipment". Oh boy, I'm in for an adventure! Good or bad, it's adventure time! The bad part of it is space, obviously, since it's a much smaller plane. I have a duffel as a carry-on so that wasn't too much of a problem. I got my window seat and of course this led to the curvature of the fuselage hitting me in the head and feet. Worth it though. I was willing to arrive with my body slightly curved for the view that I got. The slower, lower ride is a lot more interesting to watch. You don't get above the clouds much so there's lots to see down there and you can do things like watch the plane's shadow track along the ground. The weather wasn't as clear near Rochester, but flying through big fluffy clouds in a propeller plane is pretty cool too. And before long I was finally home.

I had a lot of recovery to do. I slept into the afternoon the day after I got back home, but I've been getting up progressively earlier as I start to collect myself. I've been playing handyman a bit here also. The washing machine has been taking hours to fill, and that didn't seem to change when I changed the line filter and even replaced the hose. Mom was talking about replacing the whole machine, and I wouldn't necessarily blame her. It's older than I am, so I could hardly say that it owes us anything at this point. It was tough to work on because I couldn't move it all that much. It acted like it wanted to fall apart if I tilted it or shoved it too hard, but I kept at it. Breaking the thing wouldn't be too big of a loss if we were getting a new one anyway. It turns out that there's a screen actually inside the water connection in the back and that had become smeared with gunk and clogged by its own rust over the years. I only had replacement filters for the hose, not the machine, and this screen looked like it might've been built in and not even meant to be replaced. I managed to pry it out of there though and just installed a second hose filter at the other end. It's working just fine now, so I guess I bought us another couple of years on that.

We've been getting a patch of the roof re-done and the guys who are doing that have a big compressor that they were using to run their nailgun to put new shingles on. The furnace is out right now, so we've got this little ceramic space heater going in the living room. I noticed that when the compressor spun up to repressurize the tank the circulating fan in the heater would slow down, a major sign that we were overloading the house's system. My Dad was at work, so I guess it was a good thing that I was there to play load dispatcher. I shut the heater off immediately. I also shutdown the computer and TV, then cutting off the surge protector that led to them. They aren't huge loads like the heater is, but they're quite sensitive to the voltage droop that can happen when you start up a powerful motor like that compressor, and every little bit helps I suppose.

Just as I was sitting down with a book and starting to think I was worried for nothing, I heard the compressor choke and go quiet, right about the time a certain segment of the house did the same. I had them unplug the compressor and I went down to look at our not-so-gracefully aging power infrastructure in the basement. All the breakers were shut, and I cycled a few open and shut that were in the dead zone with no results. Further along the wall I found a fusebox that looked like it had been through WWII, and was probably installed around that time. It held the real problem. I swapped out the fuse and we resumed work. You always get one free do-over on fuses, that's what I've learned. I figured that the fuse might've just been having a bad day since the poor thing looked like it belonged in a museum, what with all this glass and ceramic and other such ludicrously antiquated materials involved in its construction and whatnot.

The new fuse's life was tragically cut short around the 20 minute mark, and now I had a problem. Melting a new fuse meant the circuit we were on just wasn't going to put up with this nonsense and I'd have to come up with an alternative. I would've expected this sort of thing had we been idiots and plugged in into the 10 amp porch loop, but we had already made sure to find a better outlet than that, and it was indeed a 15 amp fuse that we were blowing out. That was worrying, as the house has only one accessible 20 amp loop. There were 2 20 amp fuses in the box, but one of those is hard-wired to the stove and serves no outlets. The accessible 20 amp loop was a lot more difficult to unload though, as it served things like the refrigerator and water pump, and a good portion of the ground floor, the extent of which I wasn't certain of. That, and it was something of a gamble. Despite a thorough search of the basement, not always a pleasant experience since it's dirt-floored, I was unable to turn up any spare 20 amp fuses. That meant that if we managed to blow one, we'd be sunk until I could find a hardware store/museum that stocks old school type-T screw-in diazed fuses.

The ideal spot to connect it to would be the dryer loop, a 15 amp circuit that powers only one socket. Unplug the dryer and they've got a dedicated circuit just for their monster compressor. Trouble with that one was it was past the reach of the 100 ft extension cord they already had on it. Adding another extension cord onto that probably wouldn't have helped the situation, and would've been downright dangerous even if it did work. My compromise was the 15 amp basement/aux loop. It was reachable with one cord, and much easier for me to unload. Turn the basement lights off, disconnect the sump pump, open the breaker for the furnace since it was laid up at the moment anyway, open the breaker for the garage since there's nothing vital in there, and the one for the fence transformer as well. I also opened the breaker that said "farm" because it was on that loop, and I didn't even know what that was for. That managed to net me enough room for all the requisite electrons to get through and do their duty for the rest of the day. Maybe I'll make the furnace my next project. The seasons keep on turning and soon enough the lack of heat will become a significant problem. Here's hoping that my transition from nuclear to coal-fired equipment goes as well as Mark Stanley's did.

By God, it's almost as if there was a practical purpose to all this nonsense I just burned six years doing. You'd think it would be far too specific of a scenario to apply elsewhere, but when I get home I find a decades-old electrical system being forced to do crazy acrobatics it was never designed for I can say "Stand back. I got this." I asked my Dad about all this business when he got home, namely why the load breakers weren't tuned to trip before the circuit fuses were. He said that the breaker box was a recent development and that the house's grid had been set up to use just the fuses. Mainly because practical home circuit breakers didn't quite exist yet when the house was wired. His closing comment was "I'll probably have to get the whole system replaced one of these days when I get the money together to have it done professionally. My father understood this house's wiring quite well being that he was the one who installed it, but he's not returning my calls these days." That's Dad's way of mentioning that his father died ten years ago. (Ten years to the day, in fact. Funny, that…) Heh, of course this is the man who refers to an upcoming milestone as "your mother's anniversary" and my mother herself as "first wife".

Anyway, that's the extent of my adventures to date. A lot of people I've had contact with have been talking up MFF in November, so that's something new that has made its way onto to table. I'm trying not to throw any too much time or thought at it right now because I committed myself to the idea of no more fun stuff until I get accepted into a college, or at the very least get the damned application sent out. The application process is rather poorly suited to accommodate veterans, particularly those who are attempting to apply as a sophomore transfer without ever having been to college before. I worked for a long time on the electronic application since they prefer and more quickly process online applicants, but the machine barfed a big handful of bistable transistors in my lap when I tried to feed it that "transferring in from a college that doesn't exist" line. I'm working my way through the printed process now. It's much slower going but much more forgiving when I'm forced to leave some things blank that I don't know or pieces of information that don't apply to me.

Hopefully my (eventual) commitment to this effort will pay off. It already has in a small way, with MFF plans spontaneously assembling themselves even when I had committed to not making them. I've been a part of  JackalConnection here for some time but never really thought much of it. And then a few days ago a fellow jackal I'd never spoken to before asked if I needed a place to stay at MFF. I told him I'd think about it. I guess I'll add that carrot to my list of tools to fight this insurmountable capacity to procrastinate that I've discovered since getting out. I think the fact that the Navy no longer keeps the Sword of Damocles dangling precariously over my head is the change that I'm having trouble adjusting to. "So if I don't get this completed on time, I'll… oh, be making the exact same amount of money and have even less work to do… Uh, yeah. I'll get right on that." The sudden lack of immediate reprisal for slacking has been quite jarring. It's led me to replace what I ought to be doing with a lot of stupid frivolous things, like writing a 20,000 word account of my recent vacation.