This Side of Lost

I've taken a lot of road trips in my time, but this one is the longest:

View Larger Map

That's approximately 2880 miles. It just barely beats out the next longest -- a Minneapolis-Albuquerque round trip to visit friends in the summer of 2004, which clocked in at around 2734 (and yes, I took the time to calculate all of the mileage for all my major road trips, and I'm including the list at the end of this post). But I think the fact that it's one-way gives it the crown easily. The pause marks are our approximate stopping points, so you can see that I'm guessing it'll take about four and a half days. We leave Sunday.

The truck has been rented, and it should be a fairly easy vehicle to maneuver, if not exactly a smooth ride. It also lacks any sort of music device that takes an input other than radio waves. But we will persevere -- either with the use of the GhettoBlaster 3000™ (portable cd player hooked up to chintzy speakers) or we may invest in one of those personal radio broadcaster things that people use to play their iPod over the radio. Has anybody used one of those? What do you think?

If you're somewhere along the way, don't be hurt that we haven't contacted you about passing through -- we're kind of on a mission and don't have much time to dawdle. So unless you're at a possible lunch spot (Las Vegas, NV, Vail, CO, Kansas City, MO, Columbus, OH), we'll just have to settle for waving in your general direction as we pass through.

Samantha's last day of work was last Friday, and she's been very busy moving most of my possessions to my new one-bedroom apartment in Granada Hills. So the place here looks pretty empty. Seems like we just got here. Strange where life leads you.

In other news:

• King Lear was pretty amazing. McKellan was quite the force onstage, as expected. It's a strange and surreal play, but the company pulled it off well. Besides the celebrity on stage, there was also a celebrity in attendance -- Tom Hanks and his family. Our biggest celebrity sighting yet. Though the play was the centerpiece of Ben and Austin's visit, they seemed to have a good time with the rest of the things we did too (beach, Hollywood Blvd, Santa Monica).
• I've done a bit of reading recently: The Game of Thrones, the first novel the George R. R. Martin Song of Ice and Fire series. It's heavy stuff, but I'm mostly enjoying it. Currently: Lamb, the Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal. Gut-bustingly hilarious -- highly recommended.
• We finally gorged on some new music with the excuse that we'll need it for the trip. I picked up This Is Me (Eddie from Ohio), Little Voice (Sara Bareilles), Blinders On (Sean Watkins), and Combinations (Eisley). Samantha also picked up three discs, but I'm tired of linking now, so you'll just have to live in ignorance.

That is all. We're off to host an empty apartment going away party. Talk to you from Poughkeepsie. Oh, and click below for the mileage of my road trips.

You know, the kind of week where it starts by saying goodbye to your spouse, then getting on a plane and flying 2500 miles away. You're familiar with that, right?

Our cross country drive went well. Samantha actually seemed to enjoy most of it. I as well had a good time, though the truck was less than optimally comfortable, but that seems hard to avoid. We hit almost all of our daily destinations on the nose and arrived in Poughkeepsie pretty much on schedule. Samantha's little apartment is nice if a little idiosyncratic. But we managed to fit everything in there, including all the boxes and bookcases we were planning on putting in storage.

I enjoyed a relaxing week or so of real vacation lounging around Samantha's place while she spent her first few days at work. I watched some movies and applied for a couple jobs. I also caught up on my reading. I finished reading Lamb and read a book of essays called Getting On Message: Challenging the Christian Right from the Heart of the Gospel. It was an excellent read -- pretty much what I was hoping for. I would recommend it to any of my church-y friends who find themselves angered and disappointed at the bad reputation the religious right is giving us liberal Christians. I would even recommend it to my non church-y friends who may be surprised to learn that many of the things that turn them off about quote-unquote religion are also the things that turn church-y people off about it.

Then my One of Those Weeks started. The flight and travel back to California last Friday was pretty uneventful, but there have been many complications to settling back into life here. Primary among them are the following:

• Missing items. Somehow my beard trimmer, shaving cream and several cookbooks have gone MIA. The cookbooks are accounted for (went to Samantha's accidentally) but the others, not so much. I'm just shaggy for now.
• Headlight failure. The left headlight on my car went out. Sounds like an easy fix, right? The owner's manual sure made it sound easy. But I failed in spectacular fashion after trying about about 90 minutes on Tuesday evening. I did succeed in completely destroying the back plug end of the bulb with my increasingly desperate and tool-aided attempts to remove it, but the rest of it remains quite implacably fixed in the socket. I guess I'm going to have to take it somewhere unless a miracle happens.
• Bike stolen. Yeah, my bike's gone. This is mostly my fault. I didn't lock it up because I thought my parking lot was secure. Turns out it's not. It doesn't help that there's no bike rack at my building. Also cushioning the blow is the fact that the bike was free -- I found it. But more troublesome is the fact that I actually really need it. You may know that my commute has increased in length from less than a mile (an easy 20 minute walk) to about 3 miles (a less easy but still manageable 20 minute bike ride). As I do not have a parking permit, my bike is my only means of transit to work (outside of the buses, which is an entirely different rant, as they do not run in a straight line between my apartment and work, which means transferring lines, and they don't have transfer slips, which means paying a fare twice for a 3 mile bus ride? It costs as much as a parking pass. Ridiculous). So I'm out of luck and paying through the nose for parking until I can get a new one.
• Bank stupidity. Samantha and I opened a new bank account and yesterday I got some materials in the mail from them. With my name misspelled on all of them. Including the new debit card. Rage.
• Short on time. I walked back into a packed schedule of evening and weekend work hours, off campus meetings and choir rehearsals that has left me with very little free time to unpack, settle in and deal with all of the above. Our cats are probably thinking we've abandoned them for real.

There have been good things happening in the past week (like a neat concert I went to last Sunday) but they haven't exactly outweighed all this. I'm normally a pretty upbeat person, but with my wife being on another coast and all, this has gotten be down a bit. I'm glad it's the weekend (even though I have to work tomorrow).

So I hope your week is going better than mine.