No nightmares, yet...

Nope, it ain't gonna work.

I spent a good part of this weekend with Sarah, but I just can't see it working. All the stuff that bugged me about her is still there, and my inability to get past those things is still there. It ain't gonna work.

A friend of mine asked me what sort of things I find annoying in other people, and the list was surprising similar to the list of things I find annoying about Sarah. I guess it's time to change partners... I really did have some hope it might work this time, since some time has passed, and I thought I missed her, but it just seemed like every time I blinked something else reminded of me why I should learn to move on. Faster.

Her cats still adore me, though, and one of them littered the floor with celebratory cat-yack.

In other news, there is great sadness. The gray kitten is dead.

I'm not entirely sure what happened, but I am reasonably sure that she was hit by a car in the road near the garage late one night last week, and either thrown or crawled to the side of the road and died. Then, at some point, something -- a fox, a raccoon, something -- dragged her under one of the cars. I went out to the garage on Friday afternoon, and there was a little gray foot in front of the garage door. A little looking found her under the Saab.

I was sad. I knew I should have trapped her and brought her in. Her brother is still around the yard, and their mother was out in the bottom field this afternoon.

Even odder, Saturday, I went out to go bury her, and... she was gone. Except for some gray fur, her entire body, including the mislaid foot, was gone.

I feel sad for all the homeless cats in the world.

I was certain I'd have nightmares last night for a completely different reason. Sarah and I went up and picked up the newly-rebuilt Saab, and then prepared to go down to her house so that I could figure out why her wireless wasn't functional. Getting out onto 340, I heard a little POOT! sound under the hood, and the car started running like crap. Got a few miles into Virginia, and pulled over. A vacuum fitting had been spit out of the throttle body, and there was a resulting huge vacuum leak. Sarah pulled up, and we figured out we had nothing obvious to plug the hole. I balled up a stretchy sweatband and stuck one end in the hole, sure that it was far too large to be pulled in.

I started the Saab, and fifteen seconds later, figured out I was wrong when the cloth got sucked into the intake. I shut it down and pretty rapidly figured out I wasn't going to be able to do anything with it there. We called AAA and they took the Saab home. The next day, I worked on it and figured out the cloth had been sucked into the #1 cylinder. I took the spark plug out and could see the cloth in the cylinder. I managed to get hold of a corner of it with a very long pair of needlenose pliers, and ripped perhaps half of it out through the spark plug hole. Then, I did what the book says you should never do: I started the car on three cylinders, leaving the spark plug out.

I was immediately rewarded with a huge cloud of lint, and a few seconds later, a big plug of dirty gray cloth came shooting out of the cylinder and across the driveway. It looked remarkably like the gray kitten's fur.

I did not actually have nightmares. At least not yet.