Add something to my List of Things I Forget I Know – leave an extra hour to get anywhere on Fridays. Sheesh. We’ve been really struggling our way west past green fields and under gray skies. Traffic keeps piling up and slowing to a stand-still and two hours into a four-hour trip sees us with still about 3 hours to go. Hopefully things will pick up because we’ve gone through our hour of grace time, eaten my thirty minutes of always-earliness and have no eaten 29 minutes into our soundcheck and load-in. If we lose another half hour this way we’ll be eating into our stage time, and that’s NEVER cool.
Heather and I, of course, drive a WHOLE lot together and over the years we’ve learned to be (mostly) tolerant of many aspects of one another. One of these things have been my tolerance of her iPod’s taste in music. I’m specifying her iPod here because Heather and I DO have vast cross-over and I know that for each of Heather’s hip-hop and pop guilty pleasures, I have some of my own that I probably can’t be too proud of. For every craptastic tune she knows backwards and forwards I have a Bon Jovi song lurking in my skull. For every bubblegum pop tune she adores I’ve got the Spice Girls in my collection.
But today her iPhone is spewing a pretty solidly awesome mix of Indigo Girls and Harvey Danger and even some ilyAIMY tunes that I haven’t listened to (much less played) in about a thousand years. Despite the traffic I’m enjoying the drive and we’ll be playing Pittsburgh tonight – always a favourite of mine.
We’re headed west at a pretty ideal time. For as much as my initial response to all the scare reports of upcoming weather had been hefty derision, the incoming “Frankenstorm” (tripartite combination of Hurricane Sandy coming from the South, a cold weather mass coming down from the North and a full moon raising tides and surf) is shaping up to be kind of extreme. Sunday home should be feeling the first effects but by Monday or Tuesday things sound like they might get pretty extreme. I don’t know, I’m generally dubious about big weather headlines as the prognosticators over on the weather channel seem to be only marginally more prescient than financial forecasters (who are proven to correctly forecast financial trends with about the same success rate as a coin flip) – but all those bold colours on all those big maps have even got ME convinced…
It’s supposed to reach as far West as Ohio, and we’ll be further inland than that by Sunday – and the storm’s supposed to have staying power, possibly hovering and dumping on the east coast through to the end of the week – just around the same time
that we’ll be JUST thinking about turning East from Saint Louis, MO.
Yeah – a pretty ideal time indeed. Meep! But I DO wish Heather and I had thought about clearing out our stairwell drains…