Well, home for Lynn anyway. Me & the kids are just visiting Cleveland for the holidays. It was a damned long drive through a drizzly foggy gray day and even the traditional half-pound of chocolate-covered coffee beans I bought (and ate pretty much) in Indiana didn't do much to perk me up.

I think it was when, stuck in seemingly eternal stop-and-go traffic at an Indiana turnpike toll plaza, I told Lynn that I was gonna rest my eyes whenever we stopped and that she should nudge me awake when it was time to roll forward again that she became concerned and strongly suggested that she drive at our next fuel stop. I demurred for a moment, then acquiesced and settled in the passenger seat for a blessed and much-needed nap...

...which wasn't to be. Instead I read stories to the urchins until the light faded and we all lost our patience, then I fiddled with the iPod, trying to use my tiny FM transmitter to broadcast my massive and rarely perused library of holiday (take THAT, Bill O'Reilly!) songs to the car stereo - an undertaking that met with ultimate failure as we entered the clogged airwaves of metropolitan Cleve-O. By then, I was so focussed on how much I hated being in the car that it was all I could do to not rip my seat belt off and exit the still-moving car just to experience some sweet horrible brief freedom before the jagged hard cold asphalt ripped the flesh from my tumbling limbs and broke and smashed my cartwheeling skull like an overripe melon.

Merry Christmas!