When I got home very early this morning, I learned some highly unpleasant things about a typical door on a typical two-car garage:

1. There is a very large spring that keeps it balanced such that a relatively low horsepower electric motor can raise and lower it
2. When that spring breaks, the door weighs eight hundred million pounds.
3. A 1/3 horsepower electric motor cannot raise, unassisted, an eight hundred million pound door.
4. A typical male of average strength can only just barely raise, unassisted, an un-sprung  two-car garage door to free his wife’s car–without passing out.
5. I think I seriously injured myself getting the garage door open.

I’m actually glad I discovered this at 2:00am and not Butterfly at 700 am, as she would be late taking T-Rex to school and getting to work.

I’m going to go medicate myself and lie down now.

I can’t sleep. Again.

Normally when I can’t sleep, I pull Lorelei out of the garage and take her for a lap around Palm Beach County. Only this time, I wandered a bit farther south: I ended up on Ft. Lauderdale Beach, a place where I used to frequent all the time–of course, I lived down there at the time, and didn’t have to drive a motorcycle 50 miles to get there.

Somehow, though, I always end up there when I’m feeling blue and need a bit of “me” time. Tonight definitely qualified as one of those nights.

I ended up at a hole-in-the-wall dive bar just off Sunrise and A-1-A called The Famous Parrot. It didn’t look particularly famous, but I was thirsty, and so I had a Jack & Coke and, less blue, I was on my way.

I figured that as long as I’m not sleeping, and I’m in the neighborhood, I ought to stop by the office and check on a 40gb file file transfer from Denver (where my company’s parent company is) that I kicked off over the weekend(!). To my great surprise, it still hasn’t completed yet–some 72 hours after I started it–but at least it hasn’t stopped.

Knock wood. It still has 56 minutes to go…

I reckon I could’ve just as easily checked on it from home. But I was already here, and figured I’d stop on by for a couple of Pita chips and a Coke before I headed for home.