"This Isn't You, This Man Is Dead"
1/15/3

Monday I woke up dizzy and went back to bed. I woke up at 11ish and played video games until 7:30.

How odd, that a person like me, so GTA, so car based game, would play Ratchet & Clank for hours and hours. The data card keeps track of how much time you�ve played. When I started playing last night, I had played 24:30. That�s 24 hours and 30 minutes.

But that�s since Christmas.

Yesterday I was back at work and due to the end of the year and some other things, including me missing a day, I�m swamped with work. Finally at 3:15 the day was over and, before I left, I made a phone call to Advance Auto Parts.

I had dropped by Auto Zone on Sunday on my way home from church to get some spark plug wires. I�d gone to Trussville Mazda�s Miata Tech Day (which was brilliant. No instructions, just access to 10 lifts.) and forgot to buy some there where they are honest, friendly, and cheap. Oh, and Trussville is basically Birmingham, so it�s 90 miles away.

Auto Zone didn�t have the plug wires. Advance Auto Parts didn�t have the plug wires. So, I decided to drop by the Mazda Dealer here on the way home. I knew that I could order some Autolite wires from partsamerica.com for $30 plus $6 shipping. I�d really have liked to get the NGK wires that my car is supposed to have. It came with them (originally, OEM like) but they are so dang expensive. Well, not really it seems. I bought some Mazda brand wires at Mazda for $38 + tax and when you open the silver Mazda box there are the little blue NGK wires with NGK written on them and everything.

Partsamerica.com was selling the NGK for $50 plus shipping. So good deal on my part.

As for the plugs, I was in the garage looking for one of those razor blades you can scrape glass with to get a decal off. It seems that the freakish antenna thing left over from some early 1990s car phone stuck on the front windshield didn�t have a hole drilled in the window, it was just via inductance. I popped that sucker off and scraped off the incredible adhesive.

Whatever that adhesive is. I want some.

Well, I find some Autolite Platinum AP3924 plugs in the garage. I�d bought them for the Saturn. I decided to see if they�d fit either the Miata or the Focus. I did a little partsamerica.com searching and sure enough, they�ll fit the Miata.

However, though platinum plugs aren�t pass� necessarily, the big thing is Double Platinum these days. Or Titanium. I miss the gold ones from the 1980s though. So tacky, so stupid, but ahhhh, I�ve got GOLD in that engine.

And the whole concept of making some exotic metal in the engine is stupid if you ask me. Gold and platinum make the claim that they conduct better, yadda yadda. Well, excuse me, but aren�t the wires full of so much resistance that the electricity is happy to jump across 2 mm of air. When you�ve got electricity so bottled up that it�s a relief for it to jump across air, what metal you put at the end of it doesn�t really matter. Unless you�re talking about corrosion protection, which Gold sure would be good at, but why not give me a copper-beryllium alloy with gold leaf and rhinestones, that�ll work just as well as anything else.

And then I�d have rhinestones in my engine. Aaah.

So now all I need is some anti-seize compound and I can do the plugs and wires. I can�t cheese like I did with the Voodoo Polished Aluminum (Magnum) shift knob and just wrap Teflon tape around the threads. I�ve actually got to get real anti-seize stuff that�s conductive and designed for sparkies.

The other thing yesterday was the passport photo. We got our passport photos made. I had looked at my old 1991 passport before we left. Ah, I was a good looking guy back then. The picture was taken when I was well rested, the color tone of the picture was good, and it was summer and my hair looked messy, but in a rogueish way. Not so for the current photos:

�I�m sorry, sir. This photo doesn�t look like you. This man is dead.�

Yes, Aisai and I are the corpse twins. Kinko�s, I shake my tiny fist in the air at you. The color tone of the picture makes us look a light blue. We are tired looking. I haven�t shaved since Sunday morning. And my hairline looks like birds have been nesting on my head. Aisai looks bloaty and has her chin up too much.

If I saw me looking like that in a video game, sure I�d shoot me, but not much, because I know no matter how many bullets you put in one of those they just rise up and lurch after you after about a minute. That�s the main reason I�ve never played any of the Resident Evil games. I don�t like bad passport photos biting me on the neck due to my misuse of ammo.

And after all that, I played more Ratchet & Clank. I�m near the end, so I�ve gone back to the beginning with the gizmos that I have and am collecting the Gold Bolts. Rather than blasting my way through, by trying to find stuff, I have to get the ol� spacial recognition units warmed up in the brain. I had a very good grasp of the lay of the land in each one I went to yesterday. And I ended up dreaming about Ratchet & Clank.

Really, it was more of a searching and figuring out how to navigate odd angles dream. I also dreamed I was in a group session type thing with people who were not unlike the people who are on The Surreal Life (WB Thursday. Note to Corey Feldman: You�re a freak!) and I ate some chocolate.

I think I dreamed I ate chocolate since I had a headache while I was asleep. I woke with a headache. I still have it. But not a really good one. This one is rather half-hearted.

Just realized how long this is. Coming to a close�

I have a doctor�s appointment this afternoon at three to get two pieces of paper signed saying I�m fit to have kids. That�s what the passport was for too. Adoption paperwork. Today, I�ll fill out my �Daddy Paperwork� for the home study. I�ve been stalling on it, I suppose. I hate this paperwork.