In which who the hell knows with these late model vehicles.

My alarm went off at the ass-crack of dawn: seven in the morning.

I’d been up ’til one, so I hit snooze twice. When my brain quit throbbing, I rolled out of bed and was about to shower when I realized I don’t have a hair dryer and it’s too cold to be outside with a wet head. I skipped the shower and got dressed.

With my coat on and Bindu on a leash, I walked across the street to meet the mechanic.

In the overly-warm lobby of the Sinclair station, I discussed the jeep’s recent behaviors with Larry and a customer who was loitering around. The customer decided the issue was bad gas. I said, “Uh, I’d gone 130 miles on that tank, and some of the symptoms preceded that tank of gas by, oh, hundreds of miles and two months.” (See why I shouldn’t be allowed to talk to folks before nine in the morning?)

I explained to Larry that I wanted to hear his thoughts before he proceeded with any repairs, and he said he’d run some tests on the jeep and give me a call.

We walked to McDonald’s and I got breakfast to go. Back at the motel, I entered my Monopoly pieces on the web site and won a copy of Monopoly for my PC from RealArcade – a $19.95 value!. I spent the morning watching TV and playing around on the computer.

I called the shop at twelve-thirty, but the mechanic was under somebody’s car so I left a message with the clerk.

I also tried to call both BMI and Pocket iNet, but the local cell carrier decided to be down this afternoon and I ended up sending emails explaining why I couldn’t.

At three-thirty, Bindu and I walked over to the grocery store. I tied her to a sign out front and went in and got another salad and another frozen meal. On the walk back to home-sweet-motel, we stopped by the shop and wandered right on into the repair bay.

The jeep’s front end is up on a lift, and the back bumper has an old tire under it. (This is the third time it’s found itself at such an acute angle – the first time being when it was being loaded onto the wrecker, the second being on the way off the wrecker – but my stuff seems to be behaving and not crashing around all over the place. Small favors.) There was a dude underneath it, and Larry was standing at a work bench… with my fuel pump.

“So you’ve decided it’s the fuel pump, have you?” I asked, and Bindu sniffed his ankle.

“Yeah, nothing was coming out of it at all.”

Squatting down and addressing the dude under my jeep, I said, “I bet that’s a fun repair to make.” He grinned at me. There was a bit of a puddle under his head. Fuel, probably. Stinky job.

I chatted with Larry a bit more. Because I found myself equally pleased by his initiative and totally irritated by it, I didn’t bitch him out for not fucking calling me before pulling my fuel pump. I mean, after all, it could be the fuel pump. It could be failing intermittently, sure. It could explain both the symptoms on the freeway and the difficulty starting.

But – and I’m no mechanic, me – I’m starting to suspect an electrical problem, even though the mechanic claimed to have tested those things, just like the Fairfield Tire did. And it’s not as if I wouldn’t have authorized R&Ring the fuel pump, it’s just that I’d told him to freakin’ call me first.

If it runs and drives after the new fuel pump goes in, I’ll be stoked. If it doesn’t, I don’t know what I’ll do. I really don’t want to pay dealership prices (everything that goes on my mom’s credit card is me further in debt) but if it’s some glinky electrical issue, I don’t know that any non-jeep mechanic would be able to find it.

So now it’s twenty past four and I’m sitting on the bed eating salad and a veggie pot pie and watching Stargate on Sci-fi. I imagine the shop’ll be calling me at five. If the thing runs, I suppose I’ll pay them and take it… and drive it around Rawlins’ infinite parking lots for an hour to see if it dies. (The problem with the symptoms are that they take somewhere between four and 130 miles to manifest.) The idea of getting back on the interstate tomorrow and having the jeep shit the bed after a hundred miles is unpleasant, to say the least. Not to mention that at one hundred miles a day, it’ll take an entire week to get to Walla Walla.

Yeah. Right.

In other news, I talked to The Ex this afternoon while my phone was working. (“I hear you’re stuck in the middle of Wyoming with a dead jeep,” he said. [The Fairfield grapevine! If only we could use its powers for good!]) He offered to come get me with a trailer and take me the rest of the way to Washington if I find myself in dire straights.

I was really moved by the offer. It seemed awfully extravagant to me at first, and I found it strange that a man who wouldn’t use a laundry basket to save his marriage would be willing to drive 2,800 miles just to help me out… but then I remembered he’s from the Driving Planet. People from his planet enjoy watching hundreds and hundreds of miles roll under their wheels! (People from mine drive only because teleporters haven’t been invented yet.)

I have no idea what I’ll do if the jeep merely seems fixed. If it’s totaled, okay, fine; I’ll abandon it and continue on in a rental car. If it’s fixed, truly fixed, I’ll drive it. But if its status remains utterly nebulous, I may turn into a total Libra and not know what to do.

Update: Larry called. They got the part pulled and tested and apparently it really was bad, but the replacement their runner brought isn’t the right one – naturally – and the proper part won’t be in until morning. I told him not to do anything else after the fuel pump goes in without consulting me. He said he wouldn’t, and further that he’s now convinced a new pump should get me back on the road. Whee!