The other day I loaded up my dogs and drove down to Los Angeles to go to an event, and all of us except Jose, my Jeep, are back here safe and sound. He’s, um, taking a few days off to get drivable again.

Yes, I know, he just had his front end worked on to get rid of that annoying death wobble, but this time it’s his rear that’s causing problems, mostly due to a Jeep Grand Cherokee running into him and busting it up.

After seeing my old teacher and friend, Rob Roberge, talk about his latest book, a memoir (Liar), at a Barnes and Noble, I thought I’d stop at Tito’s Tacos to pick up a couple delicious beef and cheese burritos to bring back with me to the desert, where Tito’s, sadly, doesn’t exist. I even considered swinging by one of the places I lived in when I was still in LA, my place in Playa del Rey just across from the beach, to snap a quick picture and see if it had changed before heading back home.

Just as the restaurant came into view, my plans and a few other things besides, changed rather drastically.

Incredibly, Jose suffered no damage to his bodywork, not even a scratch. The other driver managed to hit only the right rear (passenger side) wheel, giving the tire a walnut-sized hole but pretty much destroying the rear end. I haven’t gotten the official word yet, but the drive shaft got knocked off and I’m guessing the rear axle and differential are history, along with the suspension elements.

Unlike Jose, most of the front end of the rented Grand Cherokee broke off and lay all over the place. None of that weight saving plastic seems to hold up very well in accidents, and one of the pieces slammed into (and broke) my windshield. That scared the crap out of me, and I’d guess the dogs, too, when it hit.

While Jose’s engine ran just fine, he wouldn’t budge an inch. I didn’t know about the drive shaft or anything at the time, but when I tried to move him it was as if I had a transmission full of neutral. After meeting with some of Culver City’s finest, none of whom obliged my request to just shoot me and let me done with it, I was given some paperwork and one of the officers told me what he would do.

He suggested I walk up to Sepulveda boulevard, a few hundred yards away, and look for a place to stay the night. There are a few motels right there, and then, the next morning I could think about getting the Jeep fixed. He made it sound so simple, but I was a mental mess, probably in a little shock, and my mind was racing with all sorts of dire thoughts. I was on the verge of tears and couldn’t find my insurance information and kept borrowing their flash lights as I dug through the place where it should be.

(I should point out that I typically wear a flash light on my belt when I go out at night, but that’s part of an entry that I wanted to write last week. I kept thinking I wish I’d done that)

Thanks to the part of my brain that was still working, I decided to try putting the Jeep in four wheel drive and see if the front end could pull Jose out of the middle of the intersection. Dragging the stricken rear end along the pavement didn’t sound very good, but it turned it we could move. A little later, the cops stopped the traffic so I could complete my turn and park it on the side of the road where I’d get a ticket the next morning, but he said he’d call something in and see if I could get a pass. Nice of him to do that for me. He also said it would be okay for me to sleep in the Jeep overnight if I had to, but greeted that idea with the dismay and revulsion most normal people would.

It didn’t sound good at all, but it made it.

I then stuffed what I could into the bag I take with me to the dog park, which I’d brought along, and the pups and I then began checking out the nearby places to spend the night. My worries about how much it would cost ended up being a waste of time and energy since none of the places that had vacancies allowed pets. So, around eleven or so at night we all piled back in the Jeep to spend the night.

I thought the front two seats wouldn’t be very comfortable and was (as always) worried about them getting out and running away to get hit by a car or something, so I just stuck their leashes to the seat belts for the rear seat, which is still sitting in my front room. I figured that would give them room to maneuver around and get comfortable, but they were having none of that and after several minutes of frustration I realized there just wasn’t room in the back. It’s small, anyway.

As soon as I got into the front, being dogs, they both climbed between the seats to get up to where I was, and it must have taken close to a half hour before we settled on me sitting in the passenger seat with my legs where the driver’s legs go, Vinko in the driver’s seat, and Sami sitting on top of me. After an hour or so of resting that way, I moved to the driver’s seat with my leg where the passenger’s feet go, and tried all night long to sleep.

One of my favorite things about the Jeep is how tiny and maneuverable it is, but its size does present drawbacks when you’re trying to sleep in it with two dogs. Of the three of us, only Sami could ever get comfortable. I don’t know if it was the novelty of the situation or what, but even when I could wedge myself into an acceptable position between avoiding the sharp metal center console, the steering wheel and pedals, and just the overall discomfort of trying to sleep in a car, every time I looked at Vinko, he was sitting up.

Quite often he will lay his head on the padded part of the console and rest, but not tonight, not when I wanted him to. I kept trying to push or pull him into what I thought would be a more comfortable position with him (not easy with a dog his size), but he never got the message. Eventually he’d get into a position where I thought he could sleep, but then I’d move (trying to make myself more comfortable), and he’d get up and the whole process would start all over again.

In short, all night long, the three of us kept moving around, trying to get comfortable and constantly failing.

One thing that kept bothering me was that I had to find a tow company, a place to get the Jeep fixed, and a rental car place. I had my mobile cell phone with me, but it’s not a smart phone and had resorted to having to ask strangers for help in locating any of those. Since the Internet has replaced telephone books, I felt very much alone and isolated and both helpless and worthless.

At some point in the night, a tow truck began collecting some other car, and I walked over to talk to the driver to get their name and number or see if he had a business card. He didn’t have one of those, but pointed to the phone number painted on the side of his truck and even told me there was a (good) car repair place just on a nearby corner!

I went back to the Jeep thinking I could call his place in the morning and have Jose taken up the street and felt a whole lot better. Two problems -- solved!

I next started wondering if I could save myself the tow charges by driving the Jeep up to the fixit place. It could possibly make it the few hundred yards (meters) but it would be a painfully slow drive and I’d get in the way of and be a nuisance to the morning traffic. Still, I thought it would be worth a shot and thought it might be easier if I put the spare tire on to at least avoid peeling off the flat one and then possibly grinding down the wheel.

I jacked the Jeep up and one of the heavy duty springs that keeps the body up, fell away. I put it in the back of the Jeep, just because. I got all the lug nuts off, but the wheel was stuck on one of the bolts no matter how hard I tried to get it off. It was dark, of course, so I gave up, put all but the locking nut back on, and went back inside to sleep, figuring it was damaged and I’d have to have it towed.

So, without worrying about being a slowly moving traffic obstruction in the morning, I tried, again, to get some sleep and tackle things in the morning.

Around six in the morning I decided the time was ripe to get started. The restroom at the gas station on the corner (which was across the street from the car repair place, as it turned out), was still locked up for the night and wouldn’t open until seven or eight, so I took a leak in an alley.

I went back to the Jeep to walk the dogs so they could join me in bladder relief and rewarded them with some handfuls of kibble and cookies that I’d wisely added to the dog park bag. We were all sort of okay and I downed the coffee I’d bought at the gas station, and decided the first thing I should do, even when local businesses were still shut, was to do my legal, civic, and decent duty and call my insurance company.

At some point when the police were still around I’d managed to find my insurance card, but in the ensuing few hours, I’d lost it again. Not only didn’t I have my policy number, I didn’t even have their phone number, but the cop had assured me I didn’t need the number but that they could find it for me. I called what used to be information (411) but is now some private company, and they gave me the number and connected me. Yes, there’s a charge for the service, but I’d even skimmed through a Spanish language free newspaper that was filled with ads, but none for Progressive Insurance, the one I used.

I got through to someone at Progressive, and I have to say, my whole life changed.

My connection wasn’t the greatest and I was right next to street that was growing busier by the moment with traffic so I had to ask the woman to repeat nearly everything she said once or twice, which embarrassed me, but she stayed friendly, patient, and accommodating all during the call.

Best of all, though, was what she told me. In California, at least, all drivers are required to have insurance for damage that they cause to people or property, and I knew I was good with that. All other insurance is optional and, since it costs more, that was all I thought I had, so you can imagine my surprise and joy to learn that I had collision insurance that covered damage to my own vehicle! All night long I’d worried how much it would cost me to fix Jose (or if it was even possible) and if I’d do it.

I love that little Jeep, and couldn’t imagine either being able to pay to get him fixed or buying another car. But, somehow, at some point, I’d gotten insurance to pay to repair my own car and the most it would cost me was one thousand dollars! Sure, that’s a lot of  money and I’d normally and habitually blanch at the thought of spending that much, but if that’s all it would cost me to get Jose back on his feet and good again, I’d do it in a heartbeat!

Also, equally surprising, my insurance would also pay for a rental car. And towing. And the sweet, sweet woman on the other end of the phone call would take care of everything for me. As they say, “sign me up!” but it seems I’d already done that.

I truthfully could not and cannot remember signing up for any for that. I’m not at all sure if I was at one point wise, feeling unexpectedly generous, or if at some point it was added to my policy like one of those browser toolbars that get loaded onto your system when you install something else, but all of my problems went away in the first two or three minutes of talking to her.

The phone call(s) took about an hour or so what with all my asking her to repeat things and me walking around to get away from a using leaf blowers to clean up the sidewalk, the arrival of some road crew to block off the lane the Jeep was in for repairs or something, and my struggles to find a place I could make out what she was saying. At one point we got disconnected, which I used to check the phone’s battery and how many more minutes I could still talk before paying for more, but it did get resolved and the tow truck showed up just as we were trying to the car rental people to come pick me up.

In the end, not only did the guy from Enterprise rent a car show up to take me and the long suffering pups to go get my rental car, he was also in a Jeep! I have no idea what the odds would be that all three vehicles involved in this incident would be Jeep products (his was also an SUV or ute), but I could have paid for everything had I made a bet on that beforehand.

The amount my insurance company was willing to pay for a rental vehicle just so happened to cover the entire cost of what they had for me to rent so I through caution to the wind and paid, myself, for the extra and best insurance Enterprise offered. Not only had my recent car experiences scared me, but I once worked with a Greatful Dead fan who used to say they all called “Deadhead insurance” that let you return the burned and twisted VIN tag and have the insurance company say “thank you.”

And, after all that, they rented me a pickup truck.

I have no idea how that worked or what went into their decision, but a shiny new full sized white Nissan pickup brought me, Vinko, and Sami eventually back to our desert home after fulfilling a requested appointment to visit my doctor at a time when I was feeling decidedly ugly and spent.

I’d spent a day and night wearing the same clothes, which I’d tried to sleep in inside a Jeep with two dogs, had survived a car accident, gone way over twelve hours without eating a thing and surviving on a few swallows of water (out of the dog’s traveling jug), one cup of coffee, and for the first time in years, an actual, honest-to-goodness Coca-Cola with sugar and caffeine to keep me alert for the last fifty miles of the drive back home.

I was dazed, spent, and had managed to collect a bruise on my forehead that neither the cops nor the doctor commented on, but after visiting her, we were all back home!

And, I decided to tell you all about it.

Although both can be scary, getting lost in an officially designated wilderness area is nothing at all like getting lost in a city.

This morning, after a couple times trying and not even being able to find the back route up the mountain to get to Big Bear, I set off once again with water and my dogs. This time I may have even found the illusive county route N202, or I may have just ventured deeper into the desert and the official San Bernardino wilderness.

I’d done a bit more checking and found directions to the start of the route, so I had that going for me. Years of desert rats had deemed the trail too much for 2W pickups, but since I don’t have one of those, I figured I was good to go with my Jeep.

Which I was, at least as far as I made it.

I took off this morning thinking I might go all the way to the top but more likely I’d just go and check out part of the trail to see what it was like. The portion of it I travelled wasn’t bad at all, but I still managed to get lost.

I didn’t expect the trail would be marked, but I also didn’t expect what a few decades of those previously mentioned desert rats could do to the route. You’re not allowed to travel off road in that part of the world but at least 100 minor trails branch off the main trail and since this is the desert, any way ever taken looks the same as main road. No vegetation creeps onto the trail no matter how recently or long ago it was created.

Like I said, I didn’t expect trail markers, but I was completely unprepared for all the side trails and how much they looked just like the main road. I was doing pretty good for what I guess was a fifth or a quarter of the route, but somehow managed to lose track of where I wanted to be or thought I should be and had no idea of where I was or how I’d get back.

It was a bit unsettling, especially when the Jeep decided to overheat.

I wasn’t in fear of losing my life, but more of being uncomfortable for a prolonged length of time. By the time I admitted I was lost, I’d driven around enough to lose track of when I’d left those tire tracks and which way I’d been going. You see, maybe I’d been going in circles for half an hour or so, and a lot of the trail was bare rock, which doesn’t hold tire tracks worth a damn.

Since you’re reading this, it’s obvious that I made it back, though I can’t say how, exactly. And of course I’ll try again, and maybe next time I’ll do a bit better. In the end, it was a nice Sunday drive, other than the rising feeling of panic and hating myself.

Here's how clever I am: I may be able to fix my Jeep's "death wobble."

Yes, it still happens in spite of having the alignment fixed and the tires balanced. It shows up around 45mph and seems to be more frequent or more violent under braking so I only need to be careful in fourth gear for what that's worth.

According to the how-to-fix-it website, I'm now down to suspension elements. One of the advantages of a four wheel drive vehicle is that they're easier to get under than a passenger car, but I still think my friend Rudi had the best idea back in the day when he was thinking of digging a pit so he could work on the underside of his Volkswagens. And, now that I think of it, I could make one of those easily enough if I rented a little ditch digger, but I may save that up for later.

Instead, I was going to run to Home Depot and pick up some bricks to drive up onto to make it even easier, but today I remembered I already have some that I plan to use for that shed I never get around to building. I could drive the front of the Jeep onto those and  -- voila! -- plenty of room to mess around with suspension or even make it worse!

The bigger sticking point is most of the next things to check need two people: one to sit in the Jeep and wiggle the steering wheel back and forth and another to "observe" how the steering components work.

Hmmm.

I originally considered teaching my dog, Vinko, how to wiggle the steering wheel, but on second thought I discounted that plan. While it would be great for this purpose, the more I thought about it the less I considered it one of my better ideas. Sure, it may help here and now when I need to fix the Jeep, but what if he decides he'd like to enjoy a treat while I'm driving and grabs the wheel while I'm cruising along at highway speeds? That may not work out so well.

But, and here's where the clever part comes into play, my camera takes movies! If I can set it all up, I can aim the camera at the component I should be checking, begin making a video, and hustle into the Jeep sitting on the bricks and wiggle the steering wheel myself! Then, after a bit of that, get out of the Jeep, shut off the camera, and view the movie all without bothering another person.

What could possibly go wrong?

I get a kick out of people's reactions at the dog park when they ask me where I live. Invariably, when I tell them we (my dog, Vinko, and I) come from Landers, I'll get a variation on "way out there?" that never fails to make me smile.

I then correct them (frequently by asking why everyone has that reaction) and they back down, and sometimes the subject gets dropped and sometimes they ask more about my living arrangements or whatever. The reason I get such a charge out of it comes from an old saying and also this map:

First, the old saying, "One hundred years is a long time for Americans and one hundred miles is a long way for Englishmen."

I have to say I think that's true, and not just for Englishmen but for everyone in Europe and the old world. We in America don't have anything very old, not compared to what they have, so we get all excited about some building or other that dates back to the 1800s or, in Los Angeles terms, to the 1960s. It's sort of like what Erma Bombeck said to someone who was in her twenties: I've got cookie sheets older than that.

In the US, at least in the western part, one hundred miles isn't considered very far at all, maybe a two hour trip by car. Just about everyone I've known has driven many times those sort of distances on vacations or to shop or go to events, and no one's made a very big deal about it, but I realize a lot of people in Europe or elsewhere were born, lived, and died in the place they were born and never ventured more than a day's walk from their home.

On the map it's a little over ten miles (16km) from Landers, where I live, to Yucca Valley and a couple more to the dog park. That's about the same distance from Yucca Valley to Morongo Valley and just a little less than the trip from Yucca Valley to Joshua Tree.

I should note that Yucca Valley is by far the largest of the towns in the Morongo Basin, boasting over 25,000 people.

But, and here's what gets me, everyone in Yucca (as I call it) acts as if Landers is on the other side of the planet. Now, I admit that there's not much of a reason for any of them to drive up here for a visit, but if they want to go to Victorville or Barstow or Las Vegas, they have to drive through it, and maybe that's their only experience of the place.

But, really, people, c'mon.

Most of the residences in Yucca Valley, Joshua Tree, and Morongo Valley are all within a mile of highway 62, which runs east to west on the map. The other highway, 247, runs from the 62 up to Victorville and passes through a couple of small places that even I consider "too far" out to live in. One of those is Johnson Valley, which is mostly an off road driving place and site of the annual War of the Hammers, and then there's Lucerne Valley where you can turn to drive up to Big Bear.

Along the way to Victorville, I might add, you go through Apple Valley, which is where my congressional representative has his home and also the nearest Best Buy. It takes close to an hour to make that drive, and I can't say that I do it a lot. Not in the summer, anyway.

Our little Morongo Basin, however, with its handful of towns, is home to maybe about fifty thousand people all told, and as someone used to driving forty-five minutes to work each day, I can visit any of them in less time than it used to take me to do that.

And, yet, despite the old saying, in Morongo Basin, it seems ten miles is a long way, even along paved, straight, and empty desert roads where you can actually drive the whole way at highway speeds. Also, anything from earlier than the sixties is ancient, so we test positive for both sides of the saying.

If you think the world's changed a lot in your lifetime, do yourself a favor and read something else.

As far as most of the things I'm interested in go, nothing has changed while I've been on earth or for the thousands of years that we've been around. Sure, how we do things has changed a lot, but we as people have changed very little, if at all. We still love and fight and bully each other and get hurt over the same things, we still try to make sense of the world and ask the same questions we always have.

We're pretty much the same as every other living thing on this planet, too, in the sense that we want things, but maybe different in that sometimes we can make that happen. A bunny might really want a carrot, but unless it bounces across one during its hopping, it's out of luck. We're pretty much unique, I think, in that we can make carrots happen. Sometimes.

And here's where it gets interesting.

I'll leave aside the question of whether or not we should change the world to be more to our liking and write a bit about just how it is we go about making that happen. Whether it's the love of a woman, a big pile of tasty carrots, rain to grow our crops, a healthy herd of goats, or the destruction of our enemies, humans have always wanted things and have tried any number of things to get the results they want.

As you can imagine, this wanting and trying isn't a recent thing, and is probably as old as humankind. Sir James G. Frazer, around the turn of the twentieth century, wrote about it. A lot. He came up with a twelve volume collection that described in agonizing detail the ways we've tried throughout our history to make the world more the way we want it to be.

He also put forth an argument that I think about quite a bit. I have no idea how well his ideas were accepted in the academic world (he was a Scot who studied at Cambridge), but whether or not they're true, they took hold with me.

We have to go back to the beginning to understand his thinking, back to the earliest cave men. Putting aside cultural, clothing, and other differences, they had a lot of the same problems we do. They needed their crops to grow, their enemies defeated, and that woman over there to love them, to give just three examples. How they tried to make that happen, and how we've tried ever since to make that happen is all cataloged in his work, The Golden Bough.

Simply put, Frazer came up with the idea that the first thing humans came up with is what he called primitive magic. Early man knew that it rained sometimes, but not always when and how much he wanted. So, they tried to change that, and the first thing they thought of was magic, as practiced by the witch doctors, shamans, and the like.

It started innocently enough with sympathetic magic, people going out with water and pouring it on their fields to show nature how it was supposed to act. What better way to get fertile crops than by taking someone out into the fields and screwing?

Maybe a bit later, or maybe at the same time, other magics were popular. If someone discovered that a spear with a bit of animal fur stuck onto it by chance killed a deer, they all started sticking fur on their spears. And so on.

The witch doctors kept track of all these coincidences and they became the way to do things (and were about as successful as you can imagine).

A bit later on, according to Frazer, some people weren't all that happy with the success rate and perhaps jealous of the power the witch doctor had over the tribe. And, instead of an impartial universe that would mimic our human activities in the fields, they came up with the notion that someone other than us was in charge of the rain and if we got on his or her good side, we'd be rewarded.

As Frazer put it, we progressed from magic to religion, and priests (in a generic sense) started telling their people who was in charge of the rain and how to please them. Gods for every big and little thing were worshipped and the priests soon replaced the witch doctors as the people in the tribe who knew how to get things done.

Every tribe, every culture, who'd had their own magical rituals and practices, pretty much all evolved to have their own religious practices and rituals, and Sir Frazer pretty much covers them all. Although his twelve volume compendium was later published as a much shorter one volume book, there's still pages and pages, chapter after chapter, detailing corn gods, dead, dying, and resurrected gods, and every other manner of things we've practiced and worshipped.

From there, we discovered science, and, in a nutshell, Frazer argues that sort of similar to evolution, we've gone from magic to religion to science to get things done, with each of these evolving in turn before being cast aside.

And I think there's a lot in what he has to say on the matter. We still practice magic with our lucky panties and underwear and it still seems to be true that chocolates and roses somehow get us love, and we still pray for rain or to get a job or score a point, and we've tried everything from seeding clouds to developing atomic weapons to get our way in the world.

So, at first we thought we were in charge of what happens, then it was god(s), and now it's us again. I didn't study any more sociology (Frazer's field) than I needed to graduate, so I have no idea if anyone is talking about him and his theory any more or if it's been disproven, but I still like it.

True or not, it explains a lot. Pretty much everything, actually.

Because of where I live, I do a lot of driving through the desert.

Most of my driving, I'd say, is done between 50-60 MPH (80-90KPH) because, well, as you can see from the photo, why not? The roads are mostly straight, mostly level, and there isn't very much in the way of obstacles.

The speed I drive is determined by two things: what mood I'm in and how windy it is. Lots of time I just cruise along, taking in the desert, and enjoying the views of the surrounding mountains and whatnot. At night, when it's dark, I can't see anything except half a football field ahead and the occasional light on a property, but I still drive the same speed.

If it's windy, as it often is in the desert, I sometimes can't drive as fast as I want because my Jeep has the aerodynamics of a brick. Heading into the wind feels like hauling a full trailer, and I just do the best I can.

I mention this because it's not a rare thing for me to be passed by someone when I'm driving into town or taking a trip across the desert, most often during the early morning or evening by someone who I imagine to be going or coming from work.

But not always.

I tell myself that a lot of the passenger cars that zip around me, safely or not, are tourists whose only desire is to get the hell out of the desert as quickly as they can. I can understand that. The desert isn't for everyone, and it's nothing but something to endure for most of the people who want to either leave or get to the coastal cities from the rest of America.

The Mojave desert, where I live, is a big place, and it can take hours to get through it, and it's not the only desert in the southwest. You can get from Los Angeles to the forested mountains of northern Arizona in a day, but then its more deserts all the way through the rest of Arizona, New Mexico, and into Texas.

So, yeah, a lot of people just want to get the desert over and done with. I don't mind it a bit if they want to pass me, and I don't mind it, either, if it's a local person in a pickup who can't stand the thought of having his masculinity challenged by driving slower than he wants and sees my slow Jeep as a challenge he can't just ignore.

Many of the people who live in the area around where I live have to travel forty miles or so to work and back every day, and they have no time for sightseeing or enjoying the desert. I, on the other hand, have all the time in the world and all the expanse of the desert to spend it in.

The only thing that bugs me, and that's only sometimes, are the radio stations I can receive. There's a local station (one) that plays popular music because, well, the lowest common denominator means something, and that one comes in just fine. I guess there may be others that play some version of country, but I never listen to those because I like country music even less than pop.

There's a Las Vegas station I can pick up that plays oldies, but mostly songs I didn't like all that much back when they were popular. When I'm in the right place, I can pick up a local NPR station, and that's great for listening to jazz on nighttime drives through the black desert and non-local news during the daytime hours.

And, there's an AM station that is ... different.

Late at night, the AM station has a conspiracy theory program that is, in a word, astounding. In the early morning there's a couple gay guys who are funny, and later on, of course, they play Rush Limbaugh and a bunch of Limbaugh wannabes.

I don't listen to any of those.

My Jeep's radio also plays CDs, so I've made some of those, but they invariably start skipping as soon as I leave the paved streets, which I do pretty often. Sometimes they get scratched, so my CDs have an expected life that can be measured in hours and I get used to missing parts of songs. Jose is too old to have a USB or media port, but I don't have any iPod or iAnything for music, anyway.

So I do a lot of driving, a lot of it in silence, and it's all part of the desert life. When  you're miles from anywhere, you get used to driving, and it helps to have a dog along for the ride.

After about seventeen hours, my power is back on.

Last night it was so warm I decided to hide from the heat by taking a nap. That was going fine until I woke up around six PM and was hot. Also, the little portable AC unit was off, as was everything else that likes to use electricity.

It's the sorta thing I'm getting used to.

This time, however, the power didn't come back on after a minute or so, and I had no idea how long it had been off. So, I did what any normal person would do and panicked (but just a bit). It was around 95 or so inside the cabin (mid 30s, centigrade) and while I could stay reasonably cool thanks to water and wearing a damp T-shirt, I worried about my dog.

This week's waste of money was getting him one of those "Cool Beds," which are basically a hot water bottle filled with some spongy stuff, big enough for a dog to lie on and a couple fingers thick. He wants nothing to do with it. In his defense, it's not very cool, either, but I guess it would be if I could fill it with cold water. Since the cold water that comes from the tap is warm, I'd need to refrigerate the three gallons or so, and there's just not that much room inside the refrigerator.

But ... onto events!

After calming down a bit, I loaded Vinko into the Jeep and we drove down to the dog park. It's usually cooler there, but that may just be because of the half hour or so it takes to get there. We stayed there until it was too dark for me to distinguish him from some of the other dogs, and then stopped at the market to pick up some food. I'd heard on the radio that someone had run into a power pole and it could be a few more hours until power was restored to my area, so I wasn't sure I could use the electric range.

It was around nine at night and very dark driving home, but I passed by a number of homes that had electricity on, which I took to be a good sign. A few miles away from home, I didn't see anyone had power, so I braced for the worst and made it back to the cabin.

I should point out that even in the best and brightest of nights, I can't see anything inside the Jeep when I park it away. It has no working interior lights (but I might be able to fix that by pulling some fuse), so I can only grab what I can feel and anything missing is lost until the next morning. I didn't lose Vinko, but it was too dark for me to dissemble and eat the rotisserie chicken, so I dined on cole slaw and went outside to watch the meteors.

My view of them was somewhat compromised by a lightning storm far off to the north that kept ruining my night vision, but I saw a few great shooting stars and any number of smaller ones even in spite of the small number of clouds overhead.

Then, I decided to go to sleep and wake up early and catch the last few hours of meteors before the sun rose. I went inside the cabin, and the temperature inside hadn't dropped a bit, so I did the next best thing and surprised Vinko.

Among everything else, I have a portable mattress, yoga mat type thingy that's a couple inches thick and rarely gets used. I've always been a bit wary of what goes on outside at night, but it was such a nice night out (maybe 85 or so), that I threw caution to the winds, got wet in a cold shower, and laid down in my underwear on the mat behind the cabin to watch stars and fall asleep.

Within a matter of minutes, Vinko got up from where he'd been lying on the sand and joined me on the mat and, as far as I know, we both fell asleep.

For a couple hours, anyway.

Around two in the morning it got a bit chilly outside bivouacing, so I went back inside. It was cooler there, too, and we slept until dawn.

In the process of all that, which honestly isn't very much at all, I'd managed to break my flashlight and awakened to a cabin that still had everything needed for modern living except electricity. I learned that, if I'm desperate enough, I can make and drink room temperature coffee, but that's about it. I knew better than to heat up the stuff inside the refrigerator by opening it, so I again packed up Vinko and we headed back to the dog park. I stopped at a gas station for some coffee (which tasted great!), and we got to the park around six-thirty in the morning, greeted everyone and their dogs, and sat around watching and chatting.

It got too hot for that by eight thirty in the morning. Since the local radio said the power outage was now supposed to be resolved by noon, I took the Jeep in to see if there was something wrong with its wheel alignment. For the past couple months, once or twice I'd hit a bump on the road and the front would shimmy and it would take a couple seconds for me to regain control. The alignment is fine, and the guy said it's a Jeep thing, took ten dollars from me, and gave me a free keychain (one of those caribiner things.

It wasn't anywhere near noon, so I had the oil changed, the tires checked for proper inflation, stopped at a couple stores, and drove back home. I called the power company and the new, updated time for power to be restored was three-thirty in the afternoon, but now the outage was a result of the light winds and they'd called for extra help (I'm guessing from Palm Springs).

We got back, I fixed the flashlight by taking it apart and putting it back together, and I finished a book I'd been reading. It was in the low nineties when I decided to take a nap, and within five minutes of my lying down, all the clocks beeped.

It was just after twelve, about seventeen hours after the power went off, so I turned on the computer, paid my electric bill ($47.57USD) and sent them a "thank you" message. Then, I wrote this.