On the road (day 1)...

I got up bright and early at 5:15 am on Tuesday and was all set to get on the road by the time Galina and I went to open the store. I was going along to put the daily postal report to bed and to spend a little time introducing the new hire, Caleb, to the store. Drew was going to come in at 9 am, at which point I would take off and he would take over the training.

The report got done, along with some other things, but for some reason, the new hire didn't show up. Drew came, and I left. However, before leaving town, I dropped by a few places to take care of some outstanding bills. By the time I had done all that and filled up the gas tank, it was 10:15 am, at which time I pulled in to the parking lot of the Junction Restaurant, which lies a scant couple of hundred yards from the intersection of highways 160 and 84. My trek would start when I turned down 84 for the long trip to Houston.

The service at the Junction was abysmally slow, but the food was good. I finally got on the road a few minutes past 11 am, provisioned with some fruit, a few bottles of lemonade, and a couple of sandwiches. I've found that if I refrain from eating full meals on the road, I am less likely to be overcome by the desire to sleep. This is a good thing.

The day's drive was fairly uneventful. The car is poorly equipped for entertainment. There's an AM/FM radio, and that's it. Reception in the mountains was pretty poor, and it wasn't until I was nearly to Santa Fe that I could get anything decent on the FM bands.

The weather around me was rainy, but I lucked out, and didn't get rained on until after I'd turned off of I-40 at Santa Rosa, headed for Ft. Sumner (the site of Billy the Kid's grave..whoo-whoo), and then again between Ft. Sumner and Clovis. The classical station out of Santa Fe fed me Schubert's Eighth Symphony (the "Unfinished"), which made the drive more pleasant.

Once I passed Ft. Sumner, I put on the earphones to listen to some MP3's that I'd put on a flash card. The selections included "Wild Thing," by the Troggs, Barber's "Adagio for Strings," and "Sixteen Tons," by Tennessee Ernie Ford.

Barber's adagio affects me differently almost every time I hear it. Sometimes I feel exultant; other times, I want to cry. It's that kind of piece. For that reason, I can listen to it over and over again and never be bored.

I hit the Texas-New Mexico border around 5:15 pm, Mountain Time, entering Texas at the thriving metropolis of Texico. I immediately started looking for a place to get the car inspected, as its inspection sticker had expired a long time ago, and it's really hard to get a Texas inspection in Colorado.

No dice. The time in Texico was already 6:15 pm (Central Time) when I entered the state, and although there was plenty of daylight left, most businesses were closed. I drove on, passing through Lubbock and trying to make it to the truck stop at Tye before turning in for the night.

As I tuned around the radio dial, I found mostly C&W stations, and though I'm not a fan, I decided to dwell on one particularly strong signal and listen for a while.

There was this one song that struck me as curious. It concerns a young man who decides to go to Mexico for a good time. His Spanish is limited to the phrase "una mas cerveza, por favor, senorita" (which, my possible spelling errors notwithstanding, I believe means: "another beer, please, miss").

This vocabulary stands him in good stead in the first stanza, when he's in a bar, but in the next two stanzas, it becomes clear that this phrase has limited application. In stanza two, he meets a girl, but can't talk to her (except for "una mas cerveza..."), so she dumps him. In stanza three, he drives to the beach, gets drunk, ends up face down in the sand, can't find his truck when he wakes up, and the locals can't help him, again owing to his rather limited vocabulary.

Why on earth (aside from having a song to sing) would he then conclude that "una mas cerveza..." was perfectly adequate for his needs? Ye gods.

As I was on the outbound side of Lubbock, I tuned the classical station and was surprised to hear... Schubert's "Unfinished" Symphony. Again. This time, however, I passed out of range before the performance was complete. I wondered... was this a sign?

I finally got to Tye, filled up the tank, and then pondered whether to check in at a motel or try to go on through the night. Houston was still 500 miles off, and I knew that if I did not turn in somewhere, the night would consist of catnaps stolen at intervals between sleepy stints of driving. At that moment, an exit came up that was festooned with billboards from various motels advertising cheap rates. I decided to stop at a conveniently placed Motel 6, checked in, locked the car, and dragged my butt up to my room. Once there, I ate a PowerBar that had been hiding in my toilet kit, scanned the estabshment's limited TV selections, showered, and went to sleep.

Cheers...

On the road (day 2)...

I got up at 6:00 am, emptied the room and got on the road again. A few miles later, I stopped at an IHOP for breakfast. The service was quick and the food was good. I felt at the top of my form.

I'd been using my GPS since leaving Pagosa to track my progress back along the waypoints that I'd marked on my way from Texas to Colorado a couple of months back. I did it as more of a lark than anything else, but as it turned out, the unit came in handy twice.

Once, I came to a stop light and glanced at the unit, which told me that I was 0.02 miles from my destination (meaning that this stop light was the destination), and that my next waypoint was off directly to my right, about 27 miles away.

That meant that I was supposed to turn right there, except I really hadn't been paying attention to the road. The GPS saved me some time at that intersection.

Later, as I passed through the thriving metropolis of Goldthwaite, I hit another destination and continued on highway 84 as I dialed in the next waypoint, which turned out to be about 20 degrees to my right and about 30 miles away.

About 20 minutes later, something tugged at me to look at the unit, which now showed my destination to be directly to my right and 27 miles away. Something was wrong.

I pulled over to the side of the road and looked at my large-scale map, and realized that Goldthwaite was where I was supposed to turn off of 84 onto highway 183, heading south, eventually ending up in Austin. I turned around and a few miles down the road, saw a sign that told me that Goldthwaite was 16 miles distant. Between driving from and to that town, I would kill about 40 minutes and be no better off than I had been when I missed the turn.

I had just passed a turnoff onto a county road that led, if the sign could be believed, to a village called Moline, which was not on my map. Since the road appeared to go in the right direction, I decided to chance it and went down that road.

I was pleased to see that my GPS arrow and the road pretty much pointed the same direction for most of the trip. The road was a two-lane, twisty affair that took me past rolling ranchland where cattle grazed, apparently contentedly. At one point, I came around a curve and startled a group of about 20 vultures going about their business. It was a good thing I wasn't speeding, as one or two of the birds only managed to miss getting hit with only inches to spare.

At about this time, I dialed in the AM dial to hear what was on the airwaves. I latched onto a signal featuring a female voice that was carrying on about silly instructions that are included in various appliance manuals. It was an entertaining spiel, and I only realized later that I was listening to the "Dr. Laura" show.

I listened for about 40 minutes total, meanwhile finding and turning onto 183 south. Her callers tend to be, as far as I can see, the same kind of folks who send questions in to Ann Landers or "Dear Abby." One woman wanted to know if it was okay to not attend the funeral of her mother, whom she detested. Schlessinger told her there was nothing obligating her to go, but made a good case for going anyway. Another woman, a recent widow, had been asked by her in-laws to return an heirloom ring that had been given to her on the occasion of her marriage, and though she felt no obligation to give the ring back, wondered if perhaps she would be wrong not to. Schlessinger told her that she was not obligated to return the ring, and suggested that someday she might want to pass it down to the children who had been born to her and her late husband.

I suppose that anyone who expects serious, life-changing advice from a radio talking head needs to get their own head examined, but the same then can be said for people who write to Ann Landers or, for that matter, people who derive financial advice listening to Suze Orman hold forth on PBS. In the end, these vehicles are meant to entertain, and not particularly edify.

A few miles short of Austin, I came to a stop light and spied an official Texas inspection station on the corner to my right. As the place looked open for business and no cars were in evidence, I pulled in. Unfortunately, I did not see the camper parked around the corner, but I decided to wait out the line and about 20 minutes later, pulled back onto 183 with a completely legal vehicle.

Highway 183 led me to the home stretch: Highway 290, which leads to Houston. On the way, I ran into another talk show on the air whose host was looking for callers to discuss the results of a recent study by "family" experts, to the effect that adulterous affairs on the part of the rich and famous tended to encourage us ordinary citizens to go out and cheat on our spouses. Of course, Clinton and Conduit were mentioned prominently in the spiel.

For the first time in my life - bored as I was by the dashed centerline of the highway - I took out my cell phone and called the station. A few minutes later, I was on the air, telling the radio jockey on the other end of the line that, in my opinion, while the public behavior under discussion was not in itself going to cause people to go out and cheat on their spouses, it would nonetheless be the source of a bad, yet comforting example for those giving the idea serious consideration. Further, the specific cases of Clinton and Condit (despite the fact that, ostensibly, the women in each case were willing participants) might well encourage men in positions of power and authority to put pressure on female subordinates to enter into an affair and might give them the feeling that, perhaps, recent consciousness-raising about sexual harassment was just a lot of hot air.

The host, who had been pooh-poohing the idea prior to my call, then appeared to change course as he drew a parallel with cigarette ads, which I thought was apropos. Heck, I still remember how - years ago - my dad would light two cigarettes and hand one to my mother, a move I now understand was inspired by Paul Henreid's performance of this ritual in a movie called Now, Voyager, in which he starred with Bette Davis. (My understanding is that it was Henreid's performance in that film that won him the role of Victor Laszlo and star billing in Casablanca, but I digress...) As a former smoker, to this day there are times when I'll see someone light up (e.g., Humphrey Bogart, in the aforementioned Casablanca) and then I'll want to, also. In any event, there's not a single cigarette ad in the world that will drive anyone to start that filthy habit, but nonetheless, on the whole the ads work and the industry still strives to place advertising wherever it can.

At about that time, the signal to the station weakened, and I continued on toward Houston. It wasn't until I was about 70 miles from the city that "Houston" began to appear on signs on the side of the road. Eventually, I hit Beltway 8, where I turned south and headed for Pearland, first stopping at a store called Phoenicia, a small market that caters to the international crowd in Houston. There, I picked up some items you just can't find in Pagosa Springs, including buckwheat, tea, and Boletus mushrooms from Russia, Bismark herring from Norway, and some nice Greek olives.

By the time I got back onto the beltway - or more exactly - onto the "frontage road" that parallels the beltway (as I prefer not to be pestered by the toll booths that spring out of the concrete, it seems, every mile or so) it was past 5:00, I was still on the west side of town, and traffic was starting to become objectionable. So, I decided to pay the tolls and got onto the beltway proper, arriving home around 5:30.

Natalie was not there, which was a good sign, as she has a full-time job during the day and is supposed to be attending night school. I popped the cork on a bottle of red wine, nibbled at some olives, sardines, and cheese, and then hit the sack.

Cheers...

Scrub-a-dub-dub...

I got up this morning and went to the utility room in the back of the house to wash a load of laundry that I brought from Colorado. (Our washer there is dead and part of my mission this trip is to bring back the washer that's here, but I digress...)

No soap. As in: there was no detergent.

I went to the store, bought detergent, came back, and put the cycle in work. Then I transferred the laundry to the dryer and started to look around the place.

It was more crowded than I remember last. That was because much of the stuff salvaged from our flooded storage space was now in evidence at the house. I spied a copy of Anna and the King of Siam, which I had picked up at a garage sale ages ago and had never read. I sat down to read a few pages while the laundry dried.

The book is fascinating... Certainly different from the recent movie starring Jodie Foster and Yun-Fat Chow, which was pretty good. After 100 pages or so, I went to check on the laundry, which had been tumble-drying for a while and found it wet. I checked the lint trap and found enough lint there to make a sweater for Ming, should he ever need one. I removed the lint and restarted the cycle.

When that was done, I drove down to Clear Lake and got a vehicle pass at JSC, and then dropped by the old office to see how things were shaping up. On the way back, I stopped by the Circuit City where I bought the VAIO and despite the fact that they have a policy of not giving out duplicate sales receipts after the fact, I social-engineered my way to getting a copy of something I intend to send to Sony as a copy of the sales receipt.

I got back to the house around 3:45 pm, and started getting ready to get a few hours' sleep in preparation for my first night shift tonight when I got a call from the office: the launch has been scrubbed for today, due to weather. The next attempt will occur tomorrow night, so I am free as the proverbial bird until then.

Lee called earlier and bemoaned the fact that her schedule and mine were opposite, and that we would be lucky to see each other for a few hours this weekend, when she wasn't working. It seems fate has decreed otherwise, and if she gets back early enough tonight from school, we'll have a couple of hours to chat.

In the meantime, I have a couple of small jobs to do, as well as the rest of the ethnographic text that I brought with me. But first, I need to inflict some damage on the herring and Gruyère cheese that are sitting peacefully next to the Shiner Bock beer in the fridge.

Cheers...

Progress, and lack thereof...

I picked up a Windows Me upgrade for the eSlate, hoping the upgrade would cure the ills with which this machine is afflicted.

Dream on, Romeo.

Well, at least I have enough legitimate previous versions of Windows to allow me to install the beast on some other machine, thereby putting off the seemingly inevitable transition to the Next Thing, Windows XP. The eSlate goes back to being a Linux box once I get back from this trip.

At least the performance of the unit hasn't degraded.

I am also the proud owner of a half dozen AA rechargeable nickel-metal hydride batteries. Now I have to figure out how to keep track of which ones are charged and which aren't, as I use them (not a problem if you only own one set, but owning only one set limits you).

My frivolous purchase for the trip was a 12 CD set of Schubert, including his "Unfinished" symphony. I plan to listen to the entire set several times while here.

Cheers...