I took the truck to the Pajarito Grotto meeting last night; everyone seemed excited for me, though probably more because now I'll stop mooching rides down to Carlsbad with them. Steve, resident car mechanic guru, gave it a once-over and pronounced it a good truck. He said he'd help me learn to do some basic repairs myself as they were needed, as well.

I discovered that I do, in fact, have the super-cab with the little fold-out side seats (that would possibly comfortably seat a toddler), which means that the bank lawyers really underpriced the car. I probably got it for about $1,500 under book value.

Also, I checked out John's decking in his Dakota and got some good ideas for how I want to set up the interior of my camper shell. That's a somewhat-distant project, but I'm bound to start planning far in advance... because that's what I do.

So today there's good news and bad news.

The good news is that apparently I didn't get paid for one of my LANL travels last year and they're reimbursing me for it. I have no idea how I didn't notice that, but I checked my bank records and I never deposited a check for this trip, and I can't find a check stub for it. But I have the paperwork that requests a reimbursement for a trip last August for the exact amount LANL says their delinquent check is for. Since I had forgotten I was owed this money (HOW???), getting the re-cut check will be like free money! Yay!

The bad news is in relation to the new duplex. Apparently the people there still are not done with their house. Er, the contractors building their new house are still not done. The landlord told us last night that a more probable move-in date would be September 1. GAH! That sucks pretty hard.

So dad's check came in yesterday, I deposited it. Today I spent the morning buying the truck and getting an insurance policy on it. I own it! I drove it home and everything. Yay!

As I mentioned before, it came complete with whatever crap the previous and now-dead owner left in it. So when I got home, I methodically went through every scrap of stuff I could find and sorted it into piles for "worthless," "awesome," and "rich creamy nougat." There were some things that I really don't want to keep, like his old snowmobile suit and cap... but then it came with some really cool stuff I wasn't expecting - like a nice set of binoculars, a 2-ton bottle jack, a good giant maglight, a toolbox with assorted metal bits in it, and another plastic box with all the stuff you need in case of car screwage, like spare oil, tow cable, bungees, funnel, work gloves, etc. Oh yeah, and under the blanket in the camper were two thermarest inflatable sleeping pads, valued at about $70 each.

I had the mechanics look at the truck on Monday and it came back with a relatively good bill of health, except it needs new brakes and some new fluids. I'm having them fix everything (except a new valve cover gasket that has to be ordered) on Thursday and then I'm taking it on its first real trip! I'm very very excited about this. Down to the guads and up into the jeep trails in my own vehicle for the first time ever. wa-hoot.

In other news, I got my MIT transcript in the mail which was the final missing piece in my NASA Astronaut application, so it's in the mail. Wish me luck!

Funny that on Friday the 13th we have super-ominous weather. The sky outside is very black and there's ever-present lightning and light rain. I guess the Los Alamos spring monsoon season has started.

Richard, Nina, and I went down to Mark's place last night to check out his old couch that he wants to get rid of. It's not the best couch, but it's free so we'll take it at least for some trail period. The house that Mark stays in is amazing. It's in Nambe, so it's kind of off by itself. Great architecture, very open, nice pool, hot tub, huge yard, etc. Would be the ultimate party house.

Anyway, we convinced Mark to go bowling with us down in Santa Fe. He's currently the head of the phone tree for his Search & Rescue team, so he had to take his own truck in case he got a call. And with a stroke of bad luck, a call came for a search up near Cowles just as we were opening the door to the bowling place. So Mark came all the way down there for nothing.

The bowling was actually really fun. Now bear in mind that I've bowled exactly three times in the last ten years, and probably not more than ten times ever. But having long arms and being able to use a relatively heavy ball means I can get the ball going really quickly and have a better chance of aiming it than most. Oddly, the only person who scored higher than me was Corinne, who just got the cast off from her ankle surgery that day.

At 10pm, they turn on the "disco bowling" and everything is blacklights and blinkers & whatnot. Makes it hard to have a serious game, but... who were we kidding anyway. After our hour was up, we went into the attached game room for air hockey, pool, pinball, and vids. Turns out I suck pretty thouroughly at air hockey. Their best pinball machine (Addams Family) was off, but their #2 (Twilight Zone) offered several games worth of fun. Then I found that Rob is an excellent match for my Galaga ability. We played a great game and both placed on the machine's high score table.

Fun was had by all 11 of us. On the way out Nina found a voicemail from Mark asking if I wanted to go on the search with him, but I would have had to go back to Los Alamos to pack my gear and he didn't have time to wait for me. So I missed out.

Now it's 12:30pm the following day and Mark still hasn't reported in to work, so I guess that means he was out searching for a long time.

So when I moved out here, my friend Courtney from Boston told me I could use her Subaru Legacy wagon becase she kept it in Albuquerque and wouldn't need it. Earlier this year, she told me she wanted to sell it so if I wasn't going to buy it, she was going to have to take it and sell it. So I went ahead and bought it because she gave me a good deal on it. It's sort of a junker and I hate it, but it runs and was cheap. I'm actually only about 50% done with the payment process.

Now, yesterday, out of the blue, a friend who works at the bank drops the following on me:

Some guy who lives up in the Jemez Mountains killed himself and left the bank as the executor of his will. They're selling off all his stuff, including his vehicles. One of them is a 1994 Ford Ranger pickup with a camper shell. It's not a Tacoma, which is what I really want, but it is a 4WD pickup with a camper shell that I could actually bring down to the Guadalupe Mountains and take caving. They're asking for a relatively cheap price for it. I'm going to go look at it.

Of course, I don't have money to buy another car, but my dad is being awesome and told me he'd lend me the money for the truck on the condition that I immediately sell the Subaru to pay him back. I'll see if it's worth it this afternoon when I go check it out.

UPDATE: So I went into town for lunch with Mark, and we took the truck out for a test drive and kicked the tires. For having 107k miles, it feels really nice. The suspension feels brand new, the belts and hoses look new. Everything about the feel of the car is total quality, even though the 3.0l V6 is a pretty anemic engine so it accelerates like a bus and rev's really high. The clutch is also a bit soft, but nothing seems to be in bad shape. I'm going to have a mechanic look at it on Monday and make sure it's not about to secretly fall apart on me. We went out on a dirt road and tested out the 4WD. It crawls pretty well.

I actually fit in the back, so it'll work great as a camper. The weirdest part about the truck is that a bunch of the suicidal guy's stuff is still in it. Like his sleeping bag, blanket, some of his clothes, books, tapes, etc. I think it gives it some character. The truck comes with its own ghost story!

The Mars Exploration Rover A is on its way to Mars! It successfully launched yesterday, which makes it more successful than most Mars missions to date. It's really an exciting mission and I'll be watching it very closely. Add to that the fact that it launched on my favorite expendable launch vehicle (Delta II with all nine solids!!). Very cool. It's a shame that the on-board launch camera got iced-up during fueling and it was covered in distracting water droplets up until the mach barrier. Also, they put the camera on stage one, which means that after MECO it was basically worthless. I understand that MER-B will have the camera on stage two, which is a much better arrangement - no cryogenics to foul the view and you get to see S1 separation.

Speaking of space, my NASA application is all set to go. I'm just waiting on my college transcripts to arrive before I send it off. The deadline is the end of this month. Wish me luck!

This past weekend I helped put on the New Mexico Orienteer's first meet ever! Finally, there is orienteering out here. I've been missing it ever since I left Boston and could no longer participate in CSU and NEOC meets. Here's the results, somehow I seem to have won the longest of the courses.

I recently bought a 4-pack of DVDs - the "Jack Ryan Collection," which is all of the movies based on Tom Clancy novels. They are the same version of the DVD you would get if you bought them separately, though they are all marked as "Special Collector's Edition." This is odd, considering that they are the only edition available in Region 1. The Sum of All Fears has good special features, including an excellent commentary featuring the director and Tom Clancy himself discussing the diversions of the movie from the book and reality. The Hunt for Red October has a single commentary track, but other than that all four movies just have a single theatrical trailer and a really lame studio fluff piece attempting to sell me the movie I just bought. I get annoyed when studio's put "Special Collector's Edition" on a DVD and then give it little to nothing in the way of interesting additional content. Patriot Games; Clear and Present Danger - not a single commentary by anyone? Nothing but a lame set of interviews about how wonderful the film is? Weak. Why can't the Criterion Collection do every movie?

Speaking of DVD's, I have over time managed to upgrade my original Brazil DVD to the Criterion Collection edition, and I made my copy of Tron obsolete by buying the 20th Anniversary Edition. I found a copy of Black Hawk Down for $6 used at Blockbuster, so I bought that. Now I want to get the 3-disc special edition of that. And Nina's parents sent us a copy of The Matrix, which I already have. Sometime after this year, they will undoubtably release a box set of all three Matrix films which I will certainly buy. This leaves me with two copies of The Matrix, one each of Brazil, Tron, and Black Hawk Down that I don't need anymore. Any of my loyal readers interested in these?

PS - does anyone read this crap?

So I finally downloaded the last of the N64 ROMs as cataloged in the GoodN64 DAT file. There are about 27 gigabytes of them! It took me over a month of constantly leeching flies from my favorite ROM fileserver to get it all. And they fill up five and a half DVDs. I'm really perplexed as to why Cowering includes bad dumps and overdumps in his DAT files. If I get rid of these files (which will never work in any emulator), it cuts down on the file bloat by over 10 GB!! Perhaps I'll start publishing my own variants of the Good DATs which have no -o or -b ROMs.

I spent the weekend down in the Guadalupe Mountains participating in a cave rescue class taught by Tom Bemis of the NPS. I really enjoy cave rescue; rigging a haul system is a great logistical problem and it reaffirms my love of rope. You can do anything with rope.

My old roommate Alex got me interested in rope. He was a sailor and knew the value of knowing how to manipulate "line" to achieve... anything while at sea. He introduced me to the Ashley Book of Knots and taught me how to tie the monkey's fist. I taught a few people at the cave rescue the monkey's fist and it was a hit.

Let's see... what else is new. I got my AED certification, so now I am licensed to use an automatic defribulator on lab property. This, combined with my CPR recertification a few weeks ago should make me ready for going along as third-rider in an ambulence. My friend Mark is an EMT and invited me to come along on some calls sometime soon. It seems exciting to me. I feel like I don't have time to be a real EMT like Mark, but I'd like to have the skills in case I'm the first-responder in an accident.

Speaking of which, last night there was a freak sandstorm near Roswell as Carrie and I were driving back from the cave. The winds were, I estimate, above 100mph and there was no visibility as the air was absolutely full of orange sand. It was blowing signs down and ripping trees apart in town as we drove through. About 10 miles north of Roswell we came across a very fresh accident involving two cars and a semi. Had we not stopped at DQ in Roswell, we probably would have been right there as it happened. However, as we arrived about 10 minutes after the fact, there were already plenty of emergency personnel on site. I sat around talking to a guy who was an ER doctor at the Roswell hospital who also drove out when he heard about the accident but was not needed.

Doctors, by the way, are such cool people. They're pretty much guaranteed to be smart and have a genuine interest in being nice and helping people. I really enjoyed talking to this guy. I did not, however, enjoy the fact that they closed the highway for a couple hours while we had to wait. We just sat there in the middle of the highway and chatted while the firemen in their nomex pants and the EMTs went about removing the injured from the scene.