Sleepless

Sleepless                                                          2834

Thursday, December 29, 2005-4:45 CST

Good morning from Carbondale, Illinois, from the beautiful Super 8 motel on Main Street.  Yesterday was the hell drive from Rochester, NY....13 grueling hours in a rental car with Mike Dambra.  Thankfully, we had a month of road stories to share or it would have dragged on forever.

We're tooling around in his rental car from the week before, a Ford Taurus from the Hertz rental car agency.  It has one of those onboard GPS systems, a little gadget that looks like a pocket calculator on a bracket at a 45 degree angle, which talks to you and tells you how to get where you're going.  It's awesome, and I don't know how I'm going to live without one after the week is up.  It even tells you how many miles are left to your journey, and calculates how long it will take you to get there based on your traveling speed.  Oh, how spoiled I am!

So we arrived in C-town around 1:30, accounting for the time zone difference after a long overnight drive, checked in to the hotel and slept.  We got to the show plenty early, and they regaled us with comped food and beverages (nice people).  I enjoyed a delicious grilled chicken salad, in a feeble attempt to have something in my body that looked like vegetables.

The show was sparsely attended, what with the whole Christmas/New Year's hangover week in full effect.  Yeah, I don't want to go back to work either, but you gotta do what you gotta do.  I pulled teeth for half an hour and then watched Mike work his magic, but there were too many empty seats, the crowd was too spread out, and nobody too much cared.  We got paid and headed to Steak and Shake for a little late-night repast (Mike quit smoking, which made him hungry, I guess, and I'm always hungry so I didn't complain) and we reminisced that the last time we worked this room, we ate at the same place, and there was a cockroach, and we got our meal comped.  No roach this time around, thankfully, and we returned to the hotel for a good night's sleep.

Only I'm not sleeping....I don't know what it is, but I don't sleep well at night very much...maybe I'm excited about the rest of the week, or I slept in the car while Mike drove and now I'm all out of kilter, but I'm awake at 4:55 in the morning, and I have an 8 A.M. wake up call, and I'm typing instead of sawing wood.  I'm sure things will even out at some point this week, and I'm hoping sooner than later.  We've got a seven hour puddle jump today to St. Joseph, Missouri, and then we start heading eastward towards St. Charles (St. Louis) and then back home, and then a few days off until San Antonio.

The 2006 machine has already started grinding, and it's not even here yet.  Good God.

Ralph Tetta

Rochester, NY