I don’t know about you all, but I like those little dangly things that you put in cars to make them smell good. I like’em a lot. They were particularly helpful before I stopped smoking in the car, but even afterwards they cover up the smell of whatever fast food wrappers might be in my car at any given time. Clancy, on the other hand, hates them.

It’s all a little bit funny because my sense of smell is crap and hers is good. But then again, maybe that’s why. Having a diminished sense of smell, I like things that smell strongly unless they’re particularly foul. Even if they are particularly foul, sometimes I like the smell anyway. I am the only person I know that likes the smell of stink bombs, for instance. I also think that farts smell interesting rather than particularly bad.

Several months back, Clancy’s car got a strange odor in it. It was one of the rare times when I noticed something before she did. Clancy’s car is not exactly a model of cleanliness, so we figured that there was something in the car that needed to be taken out. The car was clean, but the smell remained. It really never got on her radar until she left town and came back. I guess driving a car that doesn’t smell bad opened her nose to how hers smells. We still don’t know what it is, but it seems to be coming from the air conditioner.

While she’s been gone, I’ve been hanging one little dangly fake leaf after another.

Oddly enough, my car has begun to start smelling, too. Clancy noticed it first, but I noticed it almost immediately after. It’s something recent. She thinks it smells like a pee bottle. She really hates that I ever do that and is kind of paranoid about it. Just to be sure I cleaned out the car and there really wasn’t much of anything in the way of likely culprits inside of it. Doesn’t seem to be tied to the air conditioner, though.

—

A year or so ago, a youngish girl (12 or so maybe?) knocked on our door to sell me some smell spray of some sort called DAMN. The bottle says “DAMN that pet odor! DAMN that smoke smell! DAMN it all Fo’ Sho'” or something to that effect. I ordinarily resent door-to-door salespeople and I don’t like how everything from little league to band has turned out kids into little Amway saleskids. In this case, she made no pretense about it being for some sort of charity and simply said that she’s trying to earn money to buy a bike. A little bottle of no more than a couple ounces was $5, but she assured me that one spray goes along way. Well DAMN if she wasn’t right about that. Two shots makes your eyes water and it’s been almost a year and both bottles are still half full.

—

Meanwhile, now our kitchen smells. I know why that’s happening: the trash can is overflowing. Unfortunately, I have nowhere to take it. Somehow, our trash can has become the neighborhood dump. Seems like every trash day, the garbagemen empty it out but then someone comes in and fills it back up again. A lot of times it’s beer, but lately it’s been like construction material or something. I was actually impressed the last time they did it because they managed to fill that thing so efficiently that you would think that they were a professional packer or something.

Friday is garbage day and hopefully I’ll have a place to put it then. In the meantime I might have to place it outside or something. On the other hand, the rotting whatever that’s producing the odor smells quite interesting. It really only bothers me because I know that it’s supposed to.

Many moons ago my roommate Karl and I moved from one apartment (a 3-person place we were sharing with Dennis) to another (a 2-person place). Our DSL high speed Internet apparently did not follow us. Our phone line did, but DSL didn’t. It took them six weeks to get it up and running for us. We were charged throughout. When I complained, they said that it’s in the contract that their only duty was to provide us with Internet access and that high speed was a perk available most of the time.

“But you haven’t been providing us with Internet.”

“Of course we have. We got your phone line up instantly and you are always free to call on our dial-up system.”

“First of all, we weren’t paying $55 for dial-up, and second whenever we tried the lines were busy.”

“We can’t do anything about that, sir.”

“You could get more lines.”

“You’re free to go with another dial-up provider, sir.”

“But you’re the only ones that can get me DSL.”

“Yes we are, is there anything else I can help you with today?”

—

Our Internet at home has been down for the better part of three weeks now. We’ve been experiencing problems for a good part of our stay in Estacado. Typically on weekends for some reason it would go down between 2 and 10 times a day. It would usually only last for fifteen minutes or so before going back up. That I could deal with. Then, about three weeks ago, it flipped where it would only go up 2-10 times a day in fifteen minute increments or shorter.

Rather than force us to start spending more time away from the computer and not let the Internet become such a dominant factor in our lives, we began to schedule our lives around the Internet. In the rare occasion that it would come up, we would stop whatever it is that we were doing and rush to our computers to take care of whatever we could while we could. With an unreliable connection, there’s a lot you don’t do even if you are up. Going Internet shopping is an exercise in futility because you never have a connection long enough to get it done and the way that the sites are set-up are not conducive to frequent disconnections. The fact that we didn’t know if we’d have a whole fifteen minutes or whether it’d crap out in two made it even more impossible.

Thus far the outage has cost us about $170. $30 of that is our monthly fee for a service we weren’t getting, which is technically a sunk cost because we’re paying it whether the Internet is there or not, but I count it anyway because it pisses me off. The $140 came from airline tickets that we almost bought on a Thursday night, got disconnected, and when we tried again Saturday morning the fare had increased from $400 to $540.

We’ve been in contact with our cable provider, naturally. They haven’t been remarkably helpful, naturally.

After it had been down solid for a couple of days and it was obviously not going to come back on our own, I called the tech support line. The guy on the other end of the line told me that their records confirmed that I was getting frequent outages but that it was up most of the time. What was peculiar was that he didn’t start talking about how he was going to help me. He just said “Yeah, it’s down.”

When I pushed, he said that fixing bad connections wasn’t his job and if I wanted to do that I would have to contact a phone technician.

“What are you?” I asked.

“A customer service agent. There’s a difference.”

“Oh, well okay. What number do I call to talk to a phone technician?”

“You can’t call them directly.”

“So how do I get ahold of one?”

“I have to forward you to one.”

“Okay… well could you do that for me?”

Surprised sounding, he said, “Yeah, okay, sure.” and he did.

The next guy I talked to was more helpful. He told me how to read the lights on the cable modem and re-confirmed that our connection has been spotty. He could send somebody over, he said, but not for a couple of days. We were headed for Colosse, though, so that was a no-go. We made an appointment for the day after we got back.

The original live technician was also not helpful. He was sure it was our cable modem, so he replaced it. That didn’t work, so he replaced the power cable. That seemed to work. He said he was going out for a minute to check the line outside, the connection would go dark, but then he would be back and the connection would come back up. The connection went down and stayed there. The guy didn’t come back.

So I called the cable company again. To save time, I asked to speak to a technician rather than a customer service agent.

“You are speaking to a technician.”

“No, I mean someone that can help me with my problem. Not a customer service agent.”

“I am a customer service agent, but I am also a technician.”

“The guy I talked to yesterday said that they were two different things.”

“We are, but your account has been flagged to talk directly to a technician because of your problems.”

“Okay, so the problems haven’t been fixed.”

“What problems?”

“The problems we’ve been having that have me talking to you rather than a CSA.”

“Oh, well I don’t know what your problems are. Just that you have them.”

“There’s no notations about what I’ve been complaining about?”

“No, just that you’ve been complaining. You’re on our high complaint list.”

“Like the one that Sprint used to kick their customers to the curb?”

“Well we don’t kick people off for complaining, but the same basic idea, yes. So what’s the problem?”

I explained the problem to him and I swear he got more irate about it than I did. He railed against the live techs that leave before they’ve done their job, told me that he would stick the reddest of red flags on my account (he made that sound like a good thing) and that he could get somebody out there the next day. That didn’t work out because I needed to reserve a specific time period, so we were going to be without a connection for another week or so before they could stop by.

Then, naturally, it started mostly working again the day before the second tech arrived. It went back to its former behavior of going down regularly but coming back up quickly. It actually was going down more regularly (once or twice an hour) but coming back up almost immediately. So when the tech showed up this morning, naturally I had to tell him that it was mostly working.

I was expecting him to say that his job was done and leave, but to his credit he didn’t. He just lamented that that was going to make fixing the problem a little more difficult, but that if he didn’t fix it then they’d just have to send somebody else to try to fix it later.

It took him less than ten minutes to discover that our connections had gone bad in the guest room wall and the wall outside. He showed the connection to me. The wires were bare, several were cut and frayed. It was amazing that we’d been getting any service at all.

That all happened this morning. It worked great when he left. We’ll see how it works when I get home. I’m actually hopeful for once that the Internet will be there for me when I need it.

I hope y’all had the merriest of Christmases or the happiest of whatever holiday it is that you celebrate. I almost put “if any”, but if you don’t have a holiday to celebrate, you need to find one. Just do the Winter Solstace if you’re the unreligious sort.

My folks got back from a cruise the day that we arrived in Delosa, so it was a less festive Christmas than we usually celebrate: no tree, no stockings, no decorations of any sort. That’s in Colosse, anyway. Right now I’m in Bavariana, the eastern part of the state, with Clancy’s family. Clancy, unfortunately, leaves tomorrow for a job interview in Cascadia. Unfortunate that she has an interview now, of course, as we’re happy she has the interview.

My big gift to Clancy this Christmas was a CD/MP3 player for her car. More on that tomorrow. The additional gifts were mostly books. I impressed everyone when it came out that I’d gotten the books several months ago. The fools think that I planned ahead, but in fact I’d bought them to justify free shipping on Amazon.com. That secret will last only until Clancy reads this.

I also got her a booklight. She’s been using a headband flashlight in bed, which is good for both reading and exploring caves, but is a little too light. It wasn’t quite as selfish as a Homer Bowling Ball, but is close enough. Unfortunately, my folks also got her a booklight. Oops.

Where I really went bust with my gift-giving was with Dad. I got him a book compilation of his favorite comic strip, but it was Publish-On-Demand, so it won’t arrive until sometime next week. A before-Christmas rush would have cost an extra $100 on a $10 gift, which we all agreed was a no-go. I also got him a Southern Tech Wolf Pack Riddell mini football helmet to match the University of Delosa one he got a couple years back, but that also didn’t arrive on time. Dad being Dad, he didn’t seem to mind a great deal.

The best gift that we got was the transfer of a bunch of old 8mm folks of me as a baby and a tot to DVD. Clancy adores childhood pictures of me. Aa couple years back she got a photobook, which was a home run. This was closer to a grand slam. Dad’s gotten really good at the gifts since he retired.

No drunkards at the Christmas Eve service this year and again the pews were half-full. After over two decades of church attendance, I discovered that the service goes by a lot faster if you sing the hymnals, read along with the readings, and participate in the prayers. It feels sort of like it did when I discovered in my last year as an altar boy that being an altar boy is actually kind of cool because it makes the service go by quicker.

Christmas lunch and dinner has given me acid reflux like you wouldn’t believe. I know I’m still young in the greater scheme of things, but I miss my young digestive system. Christmas Eve chili was as good as it ever was. We actually discussed the Christmas Turkey vs. Christmas Ham battle and wondered why we’ve never eaten goose before. After Christmas lunch at my folks place we darted across the state to have Christmas dinner at the Himmelreich house with Clancy’s family.. a move that my stomach still regrets because of (rather than despite of) the good food.

Perhaps the greatest Christmas gift I personally got this year was one that I gave myself: Last week I finished my 2006 NaNoWriMo project. By “finished” I don’t mean that no work is left to be done on it, which is what the word actually means, but that it’s at least presentable so I can show it to people. Clancy will actually get to see what I’ve been working on and I won’t have this big cloud hanging over my head, allowing me to enjoy my free time without knowing that there is something else that I ought to be doing.

I was in Delosa last week for the Thanksgiving holidays visiting family. Instead of flying I chose to drive because we’re going to get my car thoroughly inspected and decide whether or not I should keep it or will drive back in my parents car. That’s a separate story, though. It also helped because we spent part of the week in Colosse visiting my family and the other part in Beyreuth across the state visiting Clancy’s.

The inside of my car was messy as it so often is and I needed to clean it out because it’s more difficult for people that handle your car to take things from your car if anything missing would be conspicuous. I made the mistake of telling my father that I was going to clean out my car. I knew it was a mistake the minute I said, because I knew that he would say “I’ll help!”

Ordinarily such assistence would be graciously accepted. The problem is that my father believes that I have quit smoking and the pack of cigarettes I had on the drive had disappeared from my pocket, meaning that they were somewhere in my car. I desperately wanted to avoid a conversation on the matter. Cleaning out my car was one of the ways I was hoping to do that because in addition to cleaning it for the inspectors, I wanted to clean it for my father because I knew that if I didn’t, he would. But the second I said that I would clean it and he offered to help, I had inadvertently made the conversation more rather than less likely.

I told him not to worry about it and that I would take care of it. He said it was no worry at all. Then I said that I didn’t want to do it right away so I would do it later. He said that he wouldn’t mind at all getting started while I decompressed from the drive. I told him that I was a bit embarassed by the state of my car and wanted to take care of it myself and that seemed to be the magic rationale. The magic quickly faded. I wasn’t out there five minutes before he was saying that he was going to help me. I told him that he should go to bed since it was past his bedtime, but he was insistant.

I wasn’t really sure what to do. I couldn’t insist any more loudly than I already had without incurring real suspicion. Further, he was sitting in the driver’s seat near which the cigarette pack was most likely to be found. I quickly cleaned out the passenger’s side and then as inconspicuously as I could I moved on to the back seat behind him, hoping that the cigarette pack was underneath the seat. Thankfully, it was. Not wanting to put it in my pocket, I stuck it in the trash bag figuring that I could get it out later.

When we finished, Dad volunteered to take care of the garbage sack for me. Not wanting him to look inside to make sure that I didn’t throw away anything I shouldn’t have and seeing the cigarettes, I told him that I would take care of it. He insisted, I insisted. I then said that I needed to clean out the trunk of my car and I would put the garbage sack in the trash can myself when I finished. He offered to help with the trunk. He insisted, I insisted. He won and he helped me with the trunk. I figured at least the extra junk from the trunk would make it harder for him to find the cigarette pack and that I would do whatever I could to make sure that the garbage bag did not leave my hands.

As we finished, he said that I should leave the trash bag out because he wanted to look through it and make sure that I hadn’t thrown away anything that I shouldn’t. Before I could say anything, he said that he would take a look in the morning because he was getting tired. Thanks to the extra junk from the trunk meant to hinder Dad’s search through the trash bag, it took me more than half an hour to find the pack.

The next morning he said that he was going to take a look in the trash bag and seemed surprised when I didn’t object.

Kyle, one of my best friends back in Delosa, is moving out of his apartment. His platonic roommate of a few years now, Laney, has flunked out of school for good and is moving away. In a way it’s a blessing, though, because he and Laney haven’t been getting along. I had no idea of it until recently.

When two friends split up, you find yourself walking a balance. Kyle has been a good friend over the years. When push comes to shove, my loyalty lies with him. But I really like Laney as well. From a selfish standpoint, I might need her help in the future and I have no interest in burning that bridge. From a personal standpoint I feel bad for her. She had a lot more to give this world than she has given. She’s the National Merit Scholar gone bum. I know more people like that than I would care to admit.

Kyle and Laney had a really solid friendship for a while. Laney is gregarious and outgoing and Kyle curmudgeon and cynical. It worked. A few years ago when Kyle got wind that I liked Laney, he almost lit up because it was two people he cared about making each other happy (if it worked out, another story altogether). He really cared about her. He doesn’t care about many people.

But now I don’t imagine that they’re even going to speak to each other after they part ways.

My best best friend Clint had a roommate for a while, too. It started out well, but the last straw came when his roommate left town, leaving behind a kitchen full of vomit.

This happened more-or-less with his last set of roommates, too. Another set of uncomfortable situations. It’s difficult to live with someone for too long, I guess, unless there’s sex or kids in the bargain (or both!). I had a roommate throughout college and by the time it was done, I had no interest whatsoever in maintaining ties with him. Our common circles were a little too intertwined for that and with some time on my part and some patience on his, we got past most of our issues. Mostly, anyway.

My next roommate Karl and I got along with famously. But he and I almost never left our rooms. It was the perfect arrangement, really. It was like living alone, except we were able to split big-city rent. I was sorry to see that end.

But I really haven’t talked to him in quite a while. Not since I moved out, actually. Looking at Kyle’s situation, and Clint’s, I am starting to realize how really good I had it. And thinking that maybe I should send him an email or something.