the time is now steve has both. both what, we don't have a friggin' clue, but he's got them. just sat up in the back seat and started talking about them. wouldn't shut the hell up. we figure he's pretty unstable, so we locked him in the back. we just stopped for gas, somewhere in indiana, and a guy with a chainsaw invited us somewhere down the road. free beer was involved, but we declined. a rare showing of intelligence, on our part. anyway - here's the latest. we busted ass out of wyoming yesterday. took about 8 hours to get from yellowstone to nebraska. precisely what I said it would take the night before, but did they listen? nooo...it'll only take 5 hours max. so they yell at me for going to bed early. but they weren't too unhappy as they slept in the car, since I was the only one with any energy. we let steve drive for about 45 minutes this morning. he sat in the back seat for an entire day, doing nothing, while ryan and I swapped off, and when we get tired, he takes the wheel. within 40 miles, he's driving off the road, in the rain. so, I take over, since I can't sleep in the back with the car drifting in the gravel anyway, and within 6minutes, there's a red flashing light in the rear window, as a cop pulls me over for doing 81 in a 65 (note - the duck will be severely reprimanded for this, since it was his duty to watch for cops). he was cool about it, and I was too, mainly because I was too tired to really realize what the hell was going on. between the hole in the wall at yellowstone, a 132 dollar ticket, and ryan's 2mpg car, this is getting expensive. oh well.

oh, and steve got the shit scared out of him. we were in wyoming somewhere, and he looked up as a pigeon tried to pull a sharp turn out of the way. I think it was level with his forehead as it bounced off the windshield. right now he's talking about having a fan in his pants. I hope he's talking about the electrical kind. we stopped by in colorado for a couple minutes last night - fairly uneventful, except for that now we know what kind of ugly gretting sign colorado uses at it's borders. some pinkish purple and a yellow, with some other bad color. they really should have stuck with the license plate colors - white and green. it suits the state much better. the rest of the night was fairly uneventful; we just stopped every 35 miles or so across nebraska to fill up the tank. it went by fairly quickly, considering the fact that the state is 500 miles wide. that may have had something to do with the fact that we were averaging 97 miles an hour.

I don't see this logged above, so here's the other instance of where we let steve drive - he fell asleep and drifted off the road in wyoming, then 3 miles later narrowly avoided smacking two deer. we took him out of the driver seat shortly after that. it's kind of entertaining - I think that's why we let him drive. we let him sit there and pretend to drive for a while, cheat death a couple times, and then return him to the back seat so he can sleep.

while I'm at it, here's a breakdown of the eletrical status of the car. I believe this all stems from the cd player. it's attempting a hostile takeover of the rest of the electrical systems of the car. (it also runs at about 400 degrees celsius.) here's the sequence of events thus far:

1. cruise control dies. we restore it. the cd player is angered, and shuts down temporarily.
2. the interior lights were dead (and mirrors), but we replaced the fuse in minnesota. again, the cd player sees that we are reapairing things, so it takes out the dash lights. we are left with the milage meter, and a flashlight to gauge speed. the flashlight is used very little.
3. the cd player, now generally surly, starts rejecting cds left and right, and also blows out the left rear brake light. this is also the turn signal, which the officer duly noted this morning.