Stuff I may not have told you about the move.
OK, so I leave ahead of the girls. I'm driving the van, and they're driving the moving truck. I sleep at rest stops, get gas when I need gas, and generally fight off boredom by any means necessary (Mostly by trying to match speeds with attractive women. Did you know that the prettier you are in Montana, the faster you drive?) It's your average cross-country trip. America is a sometimes beautiful place, but the northern part of it is a wasteland from the Rockies all the way to, uh, Chicago, pretty much.

But just outside Minneapolis, things start to get really, really interesting. Suddenly, I smell smoke. Not the cigarette smoke I've been smelling on my unwashed self for days, but a new, more plasticky kind of smoke. I look down, and sure enough, my dashboard is on fire.

My.

Dashboard.

Is.

On.

Fire.


I just wanted to make sure you didn't miss that last bit there. Smoke is pouring out of the interior of my car. So I pull over into a closed weigh station, turn off the car, and pretty much tear apart the dash to figure out what the hell's wrong with it.

OK, a little backstory: When I got this car, the headlights were a little finicky, and the brakes were worn down so badly that my mechanic wouldn't let me drive away after replacing just the pads; he pretty much forced me to replace the rotors as well, but I don't blame him. They were ugly. But the car was free, and I pretty much expected to have to do some work on it. Anyways, as I drove the car more, The headlights got a little worse. And a little worse, and a little worse, and a little worse. By the end of our time in Washington, I had to shove my hand into the hole in the dashboard that was provided for fuse panel access, past the fuse panel, around a sharp piece of plastic that, having ripped open my dashboard, I now know exists for no other reason than to piss me off, and grab some wires that connect to the headlight switch, wiggling them around, in order to coax the car into turning on the headlights. Honestly, I'm making it sound a hell of a lot easier and more comfortable than it was.

Flash forward. Here I am, dismantling my flaming, hissing dashboard, and what I discover is that the cluster of wires which connects to the headlight switch, and the plastic sockety thing that holds them in place, is on fire. I end up having to remove that part of the dash entirely.

So here I am, in Minnesota, at sundown, and I've just removed the bit of my car that connects electricity to my headlights. What's a guy to do?

I take stock of my assets, and besides the hollowcorse cloak and wheelbarow, I've got several boxes containing computer bits, clothes and foodstuffs, a few swords and sticks, an unholy stink, born of an unholy union of my own unholy body stench and the unholy portal to whichever level of hell burns the hottest that's opened in my dash, and a jar of peanuts.

In the end, I decided to sacrifice a computer power cord, and use the copper core to re-connect my headlights. I used one of the swords to saw through the cord, then used my teeth to strip it. then I chose the two most charred looking connectors, and bridged them. Bingo. Headlights. I was unable to incorporate the peanuts, clothes, or stench into my ghetto-y fix.

So I start driving again towards Chicago. Everything is going fine, until just outside of Elgin, where I suddenly notice that there's something glowing right about where I made the bridge. Sure enough, moments later, my dashboard is on fire again. I get off in Elgin, and try to figure out what went wrong. But I can't see a damned thing. See, as well as headlights, that cluster contains contacts which provide power to the dash lights, the dome light, and the tail lights. I only had headlights, when I had them. So, at 2 in the morning, in my home town, I wander the streets for about an hour, trying to figure out who's awake and can lend me a flashlight. In the end, noone's awake, so I head over to dad's place.

I knock on the front door at dad's place, and the dogs go absolutely bugshit. I was counting on my dad being a light sleeper, and not waking up his wife, who believes me to be an honest-to-god sociopath. No hope of that now. The kitchen light comes on, and then, about ten seconds later, turns off again. I stand on the porch for a minute, feeling nervous and stupid, then decide I'll just sleep in the car, and drive home in the morning when I don't need headlights. But as I'm walking away from the house, the cops pull up. They don't stop me, they just shine lights at the yard and porch. Now, this, I think, is kinda funny. So I walk up to the cops, and tell them that they're looking for me. I hand them my ID, which still says I fucking live there, and they call and tell my dad and his wife that it's not some crazed drug-addict casing their house, it's his son, not casing the house. Dad comes out, I tell him what's going on, he grabs me a flashlight, and tells me not to come back. Since then, he hasn't returned my calls or emails.

Anyways, I figure out what went wrong, drive the car to Chicago, and, Robert's your fathers brother, I have an apartment.

Ta Da!