Editor's note: Sunzabitches. I thought I saved this before midnight. Oh well. This was technically written Sunday night.

Howdy. Before I get into tonight's entry, let me plug my next entry, which I'll do when I get around to it: Were you as much of a nut about Tecmo Super Bowl as I was? Tune in to my next post. Bill Simmons (The Sports Guy) goes in-depth into the dominance of Video Bo.

Anyway... now on to your regularly scheduled sporadical blogging...

I should really do more entries more often, rather than waiting until I've got six or seven things to write about. I know by the time I get to the end of this post, I'll have forgotten at least two of them. Regardless of that, happy birthday to Jenn, Jung, and Brian. They all turned 21 yesterday, or at least it seemed that way, since there was a giant party at Club 1030 for all three of them last night. In actuality, Jenn and Jung entered official adulthood on Tuesday, while Brian's birthday is really today. But it made more sense to have the party on a Saturday, I suppose. It was fun. The spirits flowed freely, but I left the party with a pleasant realization: My friends up here are a pretty solid group of people. At Kyle & Jimmy's last night, most everyone had a drink or two, while a couple people, well, had more than a few too many. I, of course, as I believe I've mentioned before, don't drink. And the only reason is, I don't like the taste of it. "But trust me," you say, "there's lots of drinks out there where you can't even TASTE the alcohol!" And I say, well, if I can't taste it, why bother with the unpleasant aftereffects? I'm not against drinking, by any stretch of the imagination. I just don't see the point in drinking if I'm just as happy with Diet Dew.

Anyway, I'm off on a tangent. My point I was getting at is, nobody really cares if I'm drinking or not whenever I hang out with my friends. And that's SO COOL. When I went out in Tucson, people seemed to have this really big problem with the fact that I wasn't drunk like they were. Jeff made it a priority to get me to try beer, to the point where I didn't go to any more of his "parties" for the last six months I was down there, after he left the track. You know, Jeff's a good guy and all, and we still keep in touch by phone every so often, but that got REALLY old, having to constantly defend myself for not wanting to slam a few back. Look, I tried beer. I thought it was the worst thing I'd ever taste, until I tried wine. And you know, Mike's Hard Iced Tea doesn't taste ANYthing like iced tea, nor does hard apple cider taste ANYthing like apples. And that's pretty much the extent of my alcoholic experience. When I say "tried," I mean I had a sip or two, and that was enough for my taste buds to let me know they were displeased with me.

Ba-zing! There I go, tangential again. So anyway, I was offered a Mud Slide when I got there, and I said "no thanks," and that was the extent of it. Nobody cared! It was so REFRESHING not having to explain myself or try and make up other reasons when the explanation wasn't good enough. It's nice to know I've got friends like that. It makes me feel like I'm not an outcast... whereas in Tucson, I might as well have been naked and painted with purple polka dots when I was at a party.

Another thing I noticed is that once people were actually getting drunk, Kyle came out and confiscated keys. I noted that I'd never seen that at any of the parties I'd been at in Tucson. Again... makes me glad I'm back in Phoenix, back amongst my friends, because my friends are good people. In fact, while I was leaving the party, I tripped over a rock, and John, who was sitting outside, was quick to ask if I was okay to drive. I had to laugh. "No, no, I don't drink... I'm just naturally that clumsy. But thanks for asking."

You know, speaking of Tucson... like I mentioned, I really never felt like I fit in down there. Now, to a certain extent, I was working six full days a week, and spending three out of every four Mondays up here in Phoenix anyway, so I probably didn't give it a fair shake. It's a nice enough town, as I'm sure Becky wwill tell you. But I noticed something interesting today. I had to stop by my parents' house to pick up some paperwork for the kennel. Usually I wind up lounging around for a few minutes, but it was after weigh-in and I wanted to get back home and eat dinner, which I'd already prepared earlier. So I grabbed the clipboard and the mail I needed to drop off, and headed right back out the door. My mom asked where I was going in such a hurry, and I told her, "I just want to get home, is all. I'm sweaty and I've got dinner waiting."

As I drove west on McDowell up through the draw in the Buttes, I thought about what I'd said... that I was heading home from my parents' house. Oddly enough, when I was living in Tucson, "home" was my parents' house. I would always say I was heading home from "my apartment," or "my place," or whatever. I never really felt like Tucson was my home. But up here, I've got a real concrete sense that my apartment is my home. Rarely a day goes by that I don't have to stop in at my parents' place for something or another, whether it's to drop off the meat invoice on Monday, or to leave a copy of the morning workouts on Monday and Friday, or to make the deposit on Wednesday, or... so on, and so on. It's nice not being far away from it; I'm at 44th and Oak, and my parents are at 64th and Oak. For those of you not here in town, Oak doesn't go through, though. It dead-ends at 48th Street (among several other places, like just down the street from my parents' house at the canal, and at Eldorado Park, to mention a few), so I have to take either Thomas or McDowell. McDowell is usually my route of choice, because there's far fewer stoplights to worry about; it's a smooth trip from 52nd Street to 64th Street up through the draw in the Buttes, while there's three more lights on Thomas, at 56th, 60th, and 61st streets. (There's a light at the 202/143 on-ramp on McDowell, but that cancels out the light at 46th Street on Thomas.)

Hey, look at that... off on a tangent again. Oh well. What I'm getting at is, my home is here in Phoenix. I doubt I could move anywhere elose and really feel like I was at home.

GAS "SHORTAGE" 2003 UPDATE: The worst seems to be behind us. On Tuesday, a report came down that the pipeline pressure test had failed, which seemed to doom us to another weekend of panicky gas buying. However, cooler heads managed to prevail. People finally started listening to the reports that we had enough gas to replenish the stations if they'd stop converging like flies on a carcass every time another station got gas in. Now, I haven't seen a station in two days that's out of gas. There's still almost no mid-grade or premium, but there's plenty of 87 unleaded to be found, as long as you don't mind paying anywhere from $1.99 to $2.17 , depending on where you go. More good news came today in that Kinder Morgan (the pipeline company) bypassed the failed section of line with a smaller-diameter "detour", allowing at least SOME gas to make its way to Phoenix. That bypass opened up today around 10:00 AM, from what I heard, and has started to supply some gas to the Valley, albeit not a whole lot as compared to what we usually get through that line. But every little bit helps. Now, if they'd just get rid of that stupid MTBE requirement, the prices wouldn't be so friggin' high... Yeah, since our clean-air requirements mean we have to buy special gas (you've seen the stickers: "This gas contains 15% MTBE from April to September and 10% ether from October to March" or whatever the specific dates are), and that special gas is specially expensive! Now, by the same token, California's gas is additive-free, but then again, it's more expensive than ours is (usually). Those wacky Californians...

Congratulations to Nichole for passing her EMT Basic Skills exam last week. She doesn't read my blog -- as far as I know, she doesn't even have a computer -- but I figured I'd give her a shout-out anyway.

I didn't attend Coronado on Thursday morning, as I was pretty wiped out from karaoke Wednesday night. No, not drunk... just smoke inhalation, is all. Cigarette smoke. CJ's, the place in Mesa where we've been going for the past few months, has discontinued karaoke because they don't make enough money off of it. Can't blame 'em for not showing up -- the place is a dump. There was no more than seven people in there Wednesday night, and only two of them were smoking, yet the whole place was choked with smoke the whole 2 hours we were there. Eventually, I got too lightheaded to stay inside, just like every time I've gone there, and I had to go outside. Oh well. I'm not going to miss it. I may even take a pass on karaoke for a while; the new has worn off pretty badly. And besides, our winter schedule kicks in September 1st, so I'll be working Wednesdays and having all day Thursday off instead, so I would've only been able to go to CJ's once more anyway. I dunno. The place, aside from being constantly polluted with cigarette smoke, also always reeked of frying grease, like they didn't have a ventilation system over their deep fryer and all those little particles of grease just floated out into the main room. Like I said... a dump. But it was all ages, so other under-21 friends could go.

We're into the semifinals of our August stake at the track, the Quarter-Mile Challenge. It's a 6-dog-race event, over the 440-yard (¼-mile) course, which they accomplish by rolling a starting box out to the finish line, then after the race starts, quickly jacking it up and rolling it off to the apron of the track before the dogs come back around again. Takes a quick breaker, a dog who really gets out of the box quick, because there's inevitably a jam in the turn in these races; you have to be good enough to be in front of it, or talented enough to navigate through it. Guess you could say I did my homework; I've got 4 dogs in the semis out of 12 competitors left, and those were the original 4 I entered. You had to finish 4th or better in the first round to advance, and there were three races. I ran 1st and 2nd in one, 3rd in the next one, and 4th in the last one. Now there's two races on Monday, and you have to finish in the top 3 to advance to the final on Friday. I've got 2 dogs in both races. I'll go into a little more detail if we do well tomorrow night.

Whew. I've said so much, and yet so little in this post, I feel. I could go through and edit out most of the non-topic blather and cut the word count in half. Yet still, I feel like I've forgotten a couple of things I was going to talk about... pretty much like I figured I would. I don't know. Like I've said before, it feels good to put what I'm thinking into text, because it gets it out of my head.