I got up this morning and logged into the office, even though it is Martin Luther King, Jr. day, and did a bit of work before getting to, more or less, take the day off. Dad came over and we did breakfast at the Omega like always. In many ways the Omega is more my home in Geneseo than my house in Geneseo is. Maybe I won’t end up missing my home in Geneseo as long as I visit the Omega often enough. It will continue to feel as if I have never left.
We had an ice storm last night and everything is coated in an even layer of ice that indicates that it was deposited by fog and not by rain. But then everything as the telltale drips that are caused by rain so we can determine that it was foggy and then it rained. There are few things as beautiful as the world after an ice storm. As long as you have no need to go out into the icy world this is about as good as it gets.
A lot of people in the region are without power today as ice storms tend to bring down trees and power lines (God’s way of telling the power company that he didn’t design the world to look nice with power lines up in the air everywhere.) In Geneseo I lost power for just a minute this morning. This was the first time that I have lost power while sleeping in over two years! I know this because this was the first time that the power went off while I was using my CPAP. Let me tell you, that is quite the surprising way to wake up. One moment you have an air compressor forcing air into you and keeping your throat inflated and the next minute you have the equivalent of some invisible foe pinching your nose shut while you sleep.
After breakfast dad returned home and I went back to packing. I managed to get a fair amount done today and I don’t feel too bad about the progress that we made this weekend. We didn’t make as much as we had been hoping but we still have a lot of time left and we have reduced the total volume of stuff to be moved considerably. I talked to Nate this afternoon and he is going to take a number of the old instruments like my marching trombone and three of my guitars. That is a bunch of space that I won’t have to worry about now.
I didn’t have as much packing time today as I would have liked as I have to pack the car for the return journey to Newark and get on the road before the going gets tough. (Therefore, I must get going – see the poetic logic of the situation?) I loaded the second DL380 G2 into the car (one less thing to deal with in Geneseo – one less BIG thing) and a plastic storage bin full of books, mail and miscellany that is returning to Newark with me, my clothing bag, CPAP, laptop bag and, at the very last minute, a laser printer (HP LaserJet 6L) to deliver to Johnson City.
Right at the last minute I got stuck and wasn’t able to leave the house when I wanted to because of support issues in Sao Paulo. (Sao Paulo is, of course, the Portuguese equivalent of Minnesota’s Saint Paul.) Some interesting facts about Sao Paulo are: it is the second largest metro area in the world after Tokyo (using the common system of disregarding the New York City Megaplex), it is one of the largest Italian cities in the world with five million Italians living in the city while having only three million Portuguese and two million Spaniards. It has the largest number of US or German companies headquartered outside of their respective homelands. It is the largest Lebanese population in the world outside of Lebanon. It is the largest Japanese population in the world outside of Japan. A very dynamic place indeed.
I got out of town just in time to avoid the ice again. It was above freezing this afternoon and the roads weren’t too bad but it was getting cold again and the roads would be treacherous if I stayed around for very long. I got down to Dansville and grabbed some McDonald’s to eat on the road.
While driving I finished listening to Garrison Keillor’s “WLT: A Radio Romance” that he wrote in 1992. It was pretty good and is definitely one of the books that mark Garrison’s attempt to change the style in which he writes. This was a book that showed him transitioning to the new Garrison who wrote “Lake Wobegon Summer 1956” nine years later or “Lake Wobegon Boy” in 1998. After finished Garrison’s book about life in Minnesota during the waning days of radio I began listening to “In the Wake of Madness” the story of the Whaling Ship Sharon that set sail from New England in 1841 and went on to become one of the most important news events upon her return with her captain murdered and much of her crew escaped onto Ascension Island. For years the events surrounding the mutiny were covered up but with recent uncovering of journals and news reports the story has been put back together for the contemporary audience.
The trip went quickly. I stopped in Johnson City and left there at nine. It took just under two and a half hours to go from Johnson City, NY to Newark, NJ. Not bad time at all. I got in before half past eleven and was in bed just a little after midnight. Oreo was very glad to be home and he really missed his mommy.