I Thought I Was Making Good Time Coming Home, But Then It Became A "9 1 1" Situation.

As I was leaving Eugene one night on my way home from Olympia, I called my wife to tell her I should be home around midnight or so. The time was 9:11 and it takes about 3 hours if the roads are good. She said it would be more like 1 or 2 before I got there.

About half an hour later I stopped at the Chevron mini-mart on Hwy 58 in Dexter to get a bottle of water and some gum. When I left the store, they locked the door behind me and shut off all the lights. I thought they must really close early, because it was only 9:11.

About a half hour later, as I drove through Oakridge, I was surprised to see that McDonalds was already closed so early on a Friday night. For that matter, there seemed to be NOTHING open in Oakridge. I thought man, this town must really dry up around 9 -- after all, it was only 9:11 when I hit town.

About an hour later, I slowed down to check something out, to see if I could see any lights from a house near the road at a certain spot I'd passed that morning when I was going north (another story for another time). I figured that at 9:11 on a Friday night, even in the middle of nowhere, they might still be up and I'd be able to see about how far the house was from the road, but there was no light to be seen.

Then a half hour later I pulled into the Pilot truck stop in Chemult to fuel up. I looked at the clock and it said it was only 9:11. THAT's when it struck me that it had been saying it was 9:11 ever since I left Eugene. I looked more closely at it, since I wasn't driving at the moment, and realized it was actually saying 91.1. Somehow the display had gotten changed from the clock to the radio frequency; even though the radio volume was set to 0 since I can't get any stations out there in the boonies, it was still indicating the frequency of the last station I'd had on.

I looked at my cell phone and it was 11:58. Suddenly I felt tired. But I must have already been tired if, after looking at the clock so many times on my trip home, I never noticed that the time had not changed. That was kind of a weird thing.