The moon is marvelous tonight. It's gibbous, waning and just past full, and so low on the horizon it looks huge. And, appropriately, it is harvest orange.

I love the moon. Something I think that my spirit animal should have been the wolf, a moon chaser. Just days after watching the death of a moon cycle, I've seen the birth of a new moon as a slim crescent only hours old. I've seen lunar eclipses, marking the moon in strange colored shadows. I've examined her with a telescope, inspecting the marked ridges and craters of her surface. Did you know that a perfectly full moon will rise at exactly the same moment as the sun sets? I am well aquatinted with her cycles and rotations. I think I look my best when seen in moonlight.

Maybe that's why I'm a night person.

Tonight the drivers must have been on crack. After the third to last (or so) driver comes in, I go and rearrange the vehicles in the garage. Since the addition of three new vehicles to our fleet, parking spaces in the garage have become a premium. Almost every night I find myself trying to shoehorn buses into spots where just just fit.

There's enough room. Barely. But everyone has to park just right or it's all cocked up. I also have to keep in mind that at the end of the night I need to fit a 30' Gillig in the garage as the last thing. So in rearranging stuff I need to leave a big gaping hole in the middle of everything.

Well, tonight there were four or five buses parked outside. They were just randomly scattered around the parking lot, looking like cast-off toys. And of course none of them had keys in them. So I huffed myself back inside and grabbed the keys for all these vehicles, not realizing I was doing this ass-backwards.

I stuck my head in the garage.

Good grief! The buses inside were parked every which way, with no rhyme or reason to it. And of course, there was no room to park anything inside. No wonder the late drivers had parked everything outside.

So I spent about an hour fixing everything. I went back inside and grabbed all the keys, and just moved buses.

Move 54 back. Pull 48 up, back 73 in further, and park 48 where 73 had been. Put 44 in the lower bay. Move 91 over into that empty spot where it just fits. Move 71 over just a tad so that I can squeeze 94 in. Oh no... 44 is still outside. Hmph. Ok, so I move 48 up, move 73 up next to 48, put 44 into that corner, and put 73 and 48 back where they were.

And so on. It got tedious after that.

It's like a huge jigsaw puzzle. Some buses will fit in places where others won't, and if everything isn't perfectly parked, you won't be able to fit everything in.

I've been keeping tabs on another puzzle, this one in South Dakota. That Lear jet which crashed with Payne Stewart onboard.

That was really creepy, imagining the plane flying itself over half the US with no one at the helm. There were fighter jets shadowing the plane, but the F16 pilots said they couldn't see through the windows because they were frosted over. For a while they thought they were going to have to shoot it down if it didn't land or crash before it reached the Canadian border.

When I first heard the story, I imagined those ghost trains you hear about. It didn't help that Art Bell was talking about ghost stories last night, either. That was just too creepy.

Did he plan that? Or did it just happen that way? I can't remember.