Today sure started off weird. I normally get up at 7:00 with the intention of getting to work by 8:30. This morning, however, I find myself woken up by my wife instead of the usual alarm, who then points at the clock. The clock says 8:06.

“That’s mighty strange,” I pontificate in a full-blown stupor.

I didn’t sleep too well last night at all, so I guess I must have woken up at 7:00 when the alarm went off, shut it off, went back to bed and remembered none of it. That’s the only explanation I can think of, given that the alarm was still armed and set properly for 7:00 (yes, a.m.).

So I get up, run through the whole morning routine in record time, get in the car and head to work. I was surprised at how light traffic is at 8:30 as compared to 8:00 when I normally leave—of course, it was still ruined for me by the fact that I had to sit behind the world’s largest, ugliest, slowest gravel trucks for the entire trip. I think that if I were the last man alive on Earth and decided to go for a drive on the empty roads, I would still wind up behind a gravel hauler or a garbage truck that takes eight minutes to reach 45 miles an hour.

Now I’m sitting around at the office, actually without a lot of stuff to do (okay, not really anything to do for the time being), and while I would normally fill a momentary dry spell like this with work on my own projects—stories, websites, whatever else—today I don’t feel like doing any of it. Everything feels “off,” and I’m not really in the mood to do much of anything. I’m not in the mood to just sit here, either, but I don’t really have a choice.

Our VP of Sales asked me today if I would be interested in developing a website for his next-door neighbor who apparently is redeveloping a mobile home park (that’s “trailer park” for the layman) north of town and wants to advertise the property on the web. It would probably be a pretty simple site but for some reason I’m not really wanting to accept. But I told him I would think about it and get back to him, since I suspect my initial reaction is due to the “weird ambience” surrounding me today. If it is indeed a simple site, I could score another couple hundred bucks on it, and every couple hundred counts toward the KITT project.

Speaking of the KITT project, even though I’ve got a good amount of money right now (certainly enough to have at least one of the major problems looked at and corrected), I’m not making any progress toward getting that done because I just don’t have any clue when I would get to it. I don’t have any attachment or experience with any shops in town, and I just do not have time to drive anywhere else. I have one recommendation of one shop here in town, and the person who told me about it didn’t seem to be bursting with praise—it was more like “Well, these guys are competent, even though they charge too much.” Better than being idiots, I guess.

And admittedly, around here, if you’re a competent auto mechanic and actually know how to work on domestics and vehicles older than six years, you probably ought to charge a premium—because you’ve got a service that’s the rarest of the rare.

So what else is going on? Tonight is the season finale of Star Trek: Enterprise. Hopefully it will be as good as the last few episodes have been. (Also, hopefully, I will be in the mood to actually watch it later on.) I think I need to get out of the office for a minute or something; I’m becoming increasingly disillusioned with everything today. Maybe after a quick lunch I’ll go out, cash a check and put five bucks down on Doom III at the computer store to waste some time. (Interesting how I still call them “computer stores” even though they only sell games anymore.)

Okay, that’s all for now…