It's My TV….It's My Peanut Butter

So… I missed my post on Wednesday. And I’m making today’s post only moments into the day. This is really all because I’m going to a conference this Friday and Saturday. But it’s really, really because of a particular road trip fixation I have: having the proper music. And because I have a CD player in my car that plays data CDs, this boils down to making the perfect massive mixed CD.

Driving back from Virginia this January I engineered CDs that held seven or eight musicals, because musicals are the perfect music for road trips. But this time around I’m driving several other students of various backgrounds, musical tastes, and languages. So musicals didn’t seem the best choice (particularly in that one of my passengers hates musicals so much he dislikes “Once More with Feeling” even though he’s a huge Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan). So mix CD it is.

But it was extra pressure. Figuring what of my music would go over with my friends. Not helped by the fact that two of my passengers are ethnomusicologists. People who study music for a living. So I wound up spending several hours that I logically should not have putting together the perfect playlist on Wednesday. Only to have my burning program malfunction and decide it would not work. So I switched to a different program and rebuilt my playlist. Well… I started to, because it crashed halfway through and erased what I had done so far.

So we’ll hope the CD works. Because if it didn’t I will realize that all that time was an even bigger waste of time than it seems.

Your resident road (and air) warrior, Cammy, is packing to hit the road yet again.  Fear not.  This trip is not for business or even continuing education purposes.   This is purely for fun and I’ve got reasonable assurances that there will be booze at my destination.  A certain half of this box-of-entertainment/mashed-nut duo has a Geburtstag this weekend.  A celebration must happen, even if it won’t involve blowing up a porta potty (although, I, personally, believe that it should–launching of porta-johns should be involved in all great celebrations).

Unfortunately, this means that I am trying to write my obligatory post and pack and prep for departure tomorrow.  Normally I’d be hitting that point where I plan to finish up loose ends when I wake up in the morning, but I’m actually going to run into the office for my real job for a few hours (all comments about Type A Workaholics….are probably not inaccurate) before I hit the highway.

You’d think packing for a road trip would be easier than packing for air travel, but the overwhelming amount of stuff I can bring in my car that I couldn’t dream of dragging on a plan puts me into a tailspin of “Ooooh, should I bring this????” thinking.  Before I know it, I’ve packed half my wardrobe, more movies than I could ever watch in a month (let alone that Kristy and I could manage to watch in 4 days in between all the yacking), and then I realize…..I’ve not even begun to burn tunes for the car (yes, I’m still on the CD burning phase of music….especially since my MP3 player is on the fritz and the last FM transmitter I bought for my car was crappy).  And allow me to make this crystal clear:  I. Do. Not. Drive. Without. Music.

And on that note, in the interest of not delaying my departure for lack of a good soundtrack, I will end this poorly constructed post, and I’ll catch y’all on the flip side.

So I’m visiting Cammy right now, which is tons o’ fun, but did necessitate a 7+ hour car trip which is not tons o’ fun.  Since I was driving across the Midwest, which is flat and has straight roads and not a lot of excitement, I amused myself by reading signs.  Here are a few of my favorite signs from the journey:

1.  Dueling Insurance.  My first thought when I saw this was that in some sort of political statement about the health care situation there was a place where they made insurance companies battle it out with dueling pistols, or even better swords!  It hit me a moment later that it was probably just the name of the business.  This makes me extra happy because it means that “Dueling” is probably someone’s last name.  Which means their last name is is a verb.  And that their are people out there with names like “Joe Dueling” or “Sophie Dueling.”  And for some reason that makes me happy.

2.  Missouri Pork Association.  Note that it’s not “Pork Farmer’s Association.”  No, this is an association for the pork itself.  I bet their board meetings are delicious.

3.  Billboard informing us that “The Virgin of Guadalupe is pro-life.”  Really?  Shocker.  But I’m very interested to know if Our Lady is getting paid for this endorsement.  How do the campaign finance laws apply to religious icons?  Can we also expect to see her endorsing candidates?  What about products?  “The Virgin of Guadalupe eats our yogurt, shouldn’t you?”  We can only hope.

In othe news, while crossing the Mississippi I saw something which looked disturbingly like a shark fin going through the water.  Because the Mississippi isn’t creepy enough, we must add a deadly creature way up river where it totally doesn’t belong.  (I’m fairly certain it was a piece of driftwood, but I’m having more fun thinking it was a shark)

Stay tuned for a possible follow up report from my trip home.