let the insanity begin!

i wrote the most brilliant blog entry ever when i was in detroit friday night... full of all kinds of chipper details of the rest of the trip; unfortunately, eric's g-ma's webTV didn't like the "publish" button to submit that entry, so it's lost... never fear though, i'm working on a wesite to take care of the trip details, so i'll be brief... top 3 ironies/humorous events:

(1) apparently i hum in my sleep and never knew until i hummed loud enough to wake up eric the first two nights on the road... i called roommate and she told me i've been doing that sporadically for years and she never thought it important enough to tell me... dude, i hum songs in my sleep -- how weird is that :-P

(2) apparently eric's great-great-great grandfather built the farm house next door to the house i grew up in (i.e. i grew up playing hide and go seek in an old house his faily's had pictures of for years and wondered how to find for geneology/family history research)... this fact, and the process of discovering this fact led to quite the entertaining evening knocking on random farm house doors in small town illinois this past wednesday night

(3) absolute best highlight of the trip? eric and me miss a turn leaving yellowstone national park and as a result don't get out of the park going the proper direction until 11:30pm... this means there's nowhere to stop that late until cody, WY, a good 2 hours away.... eric hands me the keys figuring i'm better at being giddy and staying awake than he is... the only road from yellowstone to cody is a "scenic highway" that i'm sure is super nice in the day... however, when it's the worst mountain driving of your 2 week journey and it's after midnight so the only thing you can see are the reflectors popping up 20 feet in front of you and signs that say 20mph with the weirdest curves you've ever seen on them, it's not so much scenic as stupidly dangerous -- but whatever, we were determined to get to cody and sleep in real beds, so i pretended it was a race car game to stay in the middle of the road around the curves (good thing there were NO other cars around for hours and hours!) and eric egged me on.... we stopped a few times to be amazed at how many countless millions more stars you can see in total blackness... then after the moon set and we were debating if montana glows in the dark, i told eric whatever the glow was, it was waving at me... he laughed and told me i was too tired to be driving anymore, and i should stop the car a minute and run around to wake up.... however, i stopped the car to prove him i was right :-P... sure enough, there were are, loud techno (i.e. please keep us awake music) blaring out of the car behind us, standing smack in the middle of wyoming state highway 296, jaws to the ground, staring at aurora borealis for the first time -- i.e. the northern lights! we totally had a cow, and did a 1:30am happy dance in the middle of the street, clapped, cheered, and had another cow while admiring the lights before getting back in the car... talk about a story to remember... where were you when... you first saw the northern lights? *i* was doing a happy dance in the middle of a state highway in the wyoming mountains... beat that! :-P

ok, so rest of trip news will come from the website i'm working on.... link here when it's done... in the meantime...

here it is 4am,... tomorrow amanda comes home and i need to move most of my stuff before then (it's currently strewn all over the house and on top of the stuff the girl who's moving into my room, who apparently moved her large furniture all into my living room 2 weeks early... whatever).... i'm not ready for packing... i'm going to wake up and serious just start throwing stacks of books in my back seat and reverse the process to unload... eric said he'd help, but i have to actually use boxes to get him to move stuff... this could pose a problem...

however, eric also said, he doesn't help if i pull an alnighter, so this is me, at 4:15am, signing off and pretending to sleep... wish me luck that i don't spontaneously explode in the next month what with quals and moving.... seriously, why can't i be employed as a professional road trip taker? i'd love that dude.

night y'all.