YES!! I MADE IT THROUGH!!!
How does anyone without gold membership get in to add an entry anymore??
Well anyway.. God, it's been crazy. I must apologize for being so sparsely available to write during this beautiful month of April. I'm finally [mostly] done with my Spring Semester, though not without enduring much pain and stress. My summer semester starts back up in only a week.
So much to say.. I barely know where to begin.. But I guess I'll start with the most recent: The hell of a week I had for finals.
Well.. I was visiting home for Easter, right? Home being about 5 hours away from where I'm going to school. While I'm at home, same old story of the car, which STILL had the check engine light on, and my grandparents wanted to get it checked out, thinking it would be nothing. Well, it's never nothing when my car has to be checked. And I predicted this to my new love, saying that I just know they're gonna say it needs a lot of work and I won't be able to drive it back to Miami..
Sure enough.. Prediction came true.
Well enough. I wasn't stressed. I've been through this routine before. I just needed a way back home. And I trusted, for some reason, that something would work out.
Which it did. To a point. My brother offered to give me a ride with his '72 Nova. How cool is that? A road trip with the brother! And, he, at the same time, was going to use this trip as an opportunity to stop by some clubs and hand out this folder and demo of his new band he's in, Moneyshot, and try to book some shows down here. So it was all gonna work out just great for us. A good old party, yes..
By the time Easter rolled around, I was extremely anxious to get back. Not only did I have some major studying to still do for my finals, but I had a Visual Basic project to work on, and a paper to write. And, plus.. I was really missing a special someone and anxious to see him again..
Original plan was to leave ass early Monday morning, but we were still up and able, so we decided to leave Easter night. And everything was working out FANTASTICALLY. Nice cruise down easy highways, I was chosing the music for the ride.. nice times, they were.
But then.. out of nowhere, and probably 20 miles from the end of Alligator Alley, something really odd happened. We both heard a rattle under the front hood, the car stalled out, and smoke started billowing out. So we made it safely to the curb. It was around 1 am.
Got out of the car.. 'Noticed something was leaking. All I could repeat over and over was "wow.." I was in a bit of a shock that we had actually broke down on the worst part of an empty highway in the middle of the night.. Then we noticed there was a LOT of stuff leaking.. a big puddle's worth now..
Okay, okay.. gotta figure out where we are and call AAA. So we walk to the callbox, a couple hundred yards away, with nothing but a dim blue light to guide us. Milemarker 398, was it? Noo.. 39.8. My brother calls AAA on his cell. He can't get a tow because he's already used his 4 free emergency road service trips. So we gotta go back to the car and get my AAA car.
As we're walking back, we see a truck with flashing lights pull up behind the car. We both start running. It's the emergency road patrol whatever.. My brother and I walk up to the truck and it's the fat lazy guy making a report about our broke-down vehicle. He asks what's the deal, and my brother tells him we're calling AAA to get a tow. Well and good. But before the emergency road patrol guy drives back off, he tell us, "I wouldn't walk far from the car, like to that callbox over there. It's mating season."
For the alligators, that is.
Holy crap, man. What a way to show sympathy. Stuck in the middle of the night during MATING SEASON and left to fend for ourselves.
Perhaps I should back up and explain, though. Alligator Alley is a stretch of I-75.. about 50-70 miles, or more, I'm not sure actually.. where it is just the Everglades and NOTHING ELSE. Not exits to anymore, no civilization, NOTHING. And people from back home would say to me when topic turned to how I get to Miami, "Oooh, you have to drive through Alligator Alley..?" And I wouldn't understand their concern at all. Not until that night. Because.. though you don't see them as you're driving by, they are EVERYWHERE.
So AAA was called using my account, and we were left to just wait. Meanwhile, my brother wanted to investigate on what happened. He started to walk from behind the car, to see if he ran over anything. I was with him, too, until I hear this noise.. I immediately stopped and was like, "what was that???" And my brother tells me that, yep.. that was an alligator. He knows because there used to be an alligator behind his apartment complex, and that was the noise it would make. So.. knowing that.. we immediately skittered right back to the car for safety.
How fucking scary is that.. You're in the dark, the fence is fucking low and droopy looking.. if those things can run 50 miles per hour, who knows what else they're capable of? But.. we started hearing them from every direction.. And that came to be the least of our problems. The mosqitoes there were so thick. An endless swarm that would refuse to leave us alone. Both my brother and I were bundled up, trying to protect ourselves from them. I had my jacket all zipped up, with the collar as high as I could get it, and a beanie hat on, trying to cover as much of my forehead and face as possible. My face was covered in welts from their bites.. and I even swallowed a few, and one might have gone up my nose. That's how thick it was, you could just breathe it in.. I had to hold my hands, covered with the ends of my sleeves, over my nose so I could breathe. And we couldn't hang in the car because, with the windows open when we stopped, they were already all in there. Plus, being Florida, it would get really fucking stuffy really fast.
Just awful.. and we went for three hours like that.
My brother had a digital camera. He took a picture of the problem underneath. Turns out there was a big fucking hole in the engine. Blew a piston rod. We were royally fucked. And me, god, I felt bad for being somewhat responsible for the demise for his beautiful orange 350 engine.
*sigh*
And I'm getting this all rambled because I want to hurry this story that's getting really long.
So.. three hours. I didn't get to sleep until after we dealt with the car in the morning when we finally got our tow.. around 9:30 am. 'Didn't wake up until 9 or 10 pm. There went my day of studying.. That was Monday.
My parents came Tuesday to rescue my brother from Miami and tow the car back home, where he already got something worked out for another engine. Well and good. But he was pretty shaken, understandably. Barely slept all night, the poor guy.
Me, I started getting sick Tuesday morning. What I thought had started out as nothing turned into frequent diarrhea, where I was just peeing out of my anus 10 times a day and enduring horrible abdominal cramps [and a slight fever]. And I had to go through finals week like that! Luckily, I had my special someone taking care of me the whole time. But I'll have to talk about him another time..
Friday night and moreso Saturday morning was the first time I started feeling better.. I was thinking I might have caught something from all the mosquito bites.. middle of the Everglades, y'know.. who knows what's lurking out there.. or it could have been the extreme stress.
Like, during the ordeal, my brother and I were fine. We didn't freak out or anything and we were just taking it in stride. We were even laughing, a natural response, probably, to something so fucking surreal and unbelievable. As if.. we were so ridiculously fucked that all we could do was laugh.