I haven’t felt this level of stress since the days of my highest credit card balances. All of this over an emission’s test?

No, all of this over hoping I don’t get my registration suspended or have to buy a new (used) car.

Emissions suck. I swear I’m going to get (a?) gray hair out of this situation.

I wish you could just “buy” a waiver. $500 for a two-year pass from VEIP. I’d be so happy for that right now …

Well, I’d been hoping that in ten weeks I’d meet my goal — two-hundred and twenty-three (or better). I haven’t.

I am, as a matter of fact, still the same weight I was last week (well, last week plus a day) — two hundred twenty-six and a half pounds.

Frankly, I’m elated. Sunday and Monday, worrying about getting my car through emissions, and the high cost of doing so, I pigged out on maccaroni salad and baked chips and glass after glass of ice cold milk.

I was pretty sure I was going to be back over two-thirty for this weigh-day. And, actually, it occurs to me that if I hadn’t been good on my diet yesterday, I might just’ve been.

Yesterday, working inside at the Indy while my car was at Ed’s, it was busy enough that Gary put me out on the road in his Jeep Wrangler Unlimited for two deliveries. I suppose that’s why last night I had a dream … about his Jeep, my Jeep, and this guy’s Jeep. No, they weren’t driving through the woods in slow motion making “kissy-eyes” at each other to the tune of some crap rock ballad.

Turns out that in my dream, instead of selling my ‘98 Wrangler to finance the purchase of my Celica, I got frustrated with the thing and gave it to Gary for spare-parts for his Unlimited (which doesn’t make much sense - Gary bought his Unlimited a year after I sold my Wrangler). Gary stuck mine in the back of his garage and forgot about it (”I knew you’d want it again, someday”), until I was over one day and he remembered he had it. Long dream sequence of moving his Wrangler over a huge pile of rocks to get to his garage, where we jumpstarted mine — (through a cool little system of UBB plugs on the side of the hood, don’t ask me) — where it turned over like a dream, and then there was another sequence where I took a variety of backroads to get the Wrangler back to my house without being spotted by the poh-leece (the registration having expired close to a year prior, and me having no insurance remaining on the vehicle).

I can even remember compiling a post in my head — “I’ve got a Jeep!” detailing how I brought the vehicle back from the verge of death, was about to renew my registration and call my insurance agent, and take it in for a quick inspection — three years in the back of a garage, it probably needed a little love & tender care.

Then Tippy clawed my foot as it dangled off the futon, and I was jarred back to reality fairly brutally, and I remembered that I had indeed sold the Wrangler — I hadn’t left it in the back of Gary’s garage, hidden by a pile of rocks and a cloudy memory.

I was, I will admit, disappointed.

(Although this being a dream explains why my Wrangler was an ‘03 Rubicon, bright yellow, with oversized tires & a hardtop as opposed to a blue-gray ‘98 with dinky 30″ tires and a faded paintjob.)

(I’m not feeding Tippy today).