Pulling into the parking lot at work today, some guy looking over his shoulder and not paying attention plowed right into the side of my car. Fer Chrissakes, WTF is it with me and cars lately?? Sitting in my car waiting for the cops to show. Grr.

Sears says it’s a bad fuel pump. Sears also says they don’t do fuel pumps.

The guy at the auto service place down the road says “you have a del Sol? Cool! I used to have one too. Put an Integra engine in it.” He also says that it seems to be a bad fuel pump, and the car should be running tomorrow.

David and I got nailed on the way home from work today. We were stopped at a light, a guy came flying through and plowed into the side of David’s car. Wham, bang, both cars totaled.

Nobody was hurt, but the cops took the driver of the car that hit us off in handcuffs. He doesn’t speak English and had no license or ID. What’s left of David’s car got scraped up off the road (I mean that literally; they dragged it onto a flatbed with the wheels locked) and is off at some place somewhere waiting for some insurance company to do whatever it is they do.

So. Everyone’s fine, but that will make transportation to and from Dragon*Con a bit more interesting this weekend.

It appears the IRS has discovered that I did in fact file my taxes in 2006, just like I thought I had. They have, however, now moved on to a new and weirder problem.

They’re now notifying me that they want to see the records of my expenses and income from all the rental property I own. Specifically, they want me to fill out a form showing my total combined income from all my rental properties, together with itemized expenses for maintenance, repairs, and advertising for those rental properties.

*blink* *blink*

I have never in my life owned rental property. This is just getting bizarre.

It is now four o’clock in the morning. The carpet guy, who has an Australian accent and swears like the devil with a hot poker in his foot, just left. He ripped up all the carpet, vacuumed up the rather astonishing quantity of water beneath it, and departed. The place is well and truly trashed, though surprisingly the only things that were destroyed (other than the carpet) were a 25-pound box of kitty litter and a twelve-pack of toilet paper. I have gone from a plethora of toilet paper to a paucity of toilet paper in a snap of the fingers.

Twenty-five pounds of kitty litter is more kitty litter than you think. Especially when it’s burst out of a soggy cardboard box onto the kitchen floor, where it’s then absorbed approximately sixteen metric tons (or two-thirds of a metric fuckton) of water.

I passed “utterly exhausted” about two hours ago and I am now in the Land of Delirium beyond, where pixies cavort in unsavory ways with the shade of Henry Kissinger.

The cat is no longer amused.

It’s one o’clock in the morning. I spent the weekend in Tallahassee visiting Shelly, and arrived home to find…

…the burner in my gas-powered water heater running full blast, the water heater emergency venting like crazy, and my entire apartment flooded ankle-deep in hot water.

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Goddamn shit fuck goddamn fucking fuck.

The cat thinks this is all terribly amusing.

So a week ago last Sunday, joreth came up to visit for a few days. Or, at least that was the plan.

Turns out that what was planned and what actually happened weren’t exactly similar. She left Wednesday, started driving back to Florida, and experienced what engineering folk like to call “sudden catastrophic failure” of her automobile. Specifically, the clutch, which if you’re not familiar with these things is the bit that connects the engine to the wheels. With no clutch, the engine spins and spins, but the car doesn’t exactly move. More like just sits there, in the opposite-of-moving kind of way.

So I drove down and brought her back, while her car sat in a repair shop in the middle of rural Georgia awaiting repair. Took them quite a while to make the car go again, which means her three-day visit turned into a nine-day visit.

Now, you might think that’d be good news, and that lots of Kinky Goings On would ensue. Except that, well, I managed to give her my cold, which made her useless to me not feeling up to being frisky for most of that time.

Right shame, it is.

Anyway, she and her car are now operating properly and are now back in Orlando. And in a wonderous stroke of good news, it turns out I’ll be at Frolicon this month after all…and better still, I’ll be there with dayo and figment_j! Life rocks.

The week after, I’ll be at Florida Poly Retreat and apparently I’ll be joreth‘s minion for the weekend. I’ll also be presenting a panel on how to muck up a poly relationship and make everyone in it unhappy, which will stress the importance of avoiding communication, behaving emotionally, and using boundaries as blunt instruments in the pursuit of lasting human misery.