And so it begins...

...the great vacation of my life. Well, again... summer '03 was a helluva vacation. It's just that I actually knew when that one was going to end. Also, this one hasn't really felt like a vacation yet, despite the memories I have of family roadtrips being dredged up by hours on the road in a car with my brother headed to a ski resort. First of all, those roadtrips never felt like vacations, the vacation was when we got the hell out of the car at wherever our destination was (usually Lake Tahoe). Also, it's a little different when a. I'm driving, b. there are iPods, and c. my brother and I actually get along. None of this "that's my side" crap--it's all my side, cuz it's my damn car. And we figured out a music compromise, too: while I could pull rank and listen to whatever crappy pop music I want (I should really get the play counts up on those Britney Spears and Spice Girls mp3s), my brother and I spent about 5 hours just switching off whose iPod was playing after every song (I have a cord coming out of my stereo that can be plugged into anything you can plug headphones into). That way, we get to listen to whatever we want, and learn about other music, too. I've learned that I need to steal everything he has by Jimmy Eat World, Dispatch, and RKD2, to name a few. I've also learned that he hasn't heard nearly enough Guster or Aimee Mann. ...I don't really know what he's learned. Probably that I like Better Than Ezra way more than is healthy and that my remaining 2400 mp3s are total crap. But hey, it's my car. I'll make us listen to BTE all the way to LA, don't think I won't.

Thankfully, now it's Saturday night (and I'm doing my ultra cool blogging-on-a-Saturday-night thing) and I'm in Park City, and will get up at 7:30 a.m. to going skiing tomorrow. It's about time I had some friggin' R&R... um, well, relaxation, anyway. That last entry was the calm before the storm (feels like I've had a lot of storms lately). Tuesday I began the process of actually moving out of my apartment by getting a storage space, boxes, and tying up a few other loose ends. Remember how I had a lease? I needed to get rid of that. Thankfully, Tuesday night I got a call from a girl interested in taking it over, and that same night I drove a rental application over to her and faxed it to my landlord. She signed the lease Wednesday and gave me a check for the deposit, and I was free! My brother got in late Tuesday night, then slept all day Wednesday while I packed and took care of getting a music-playing device put back into my car (you can't drive 2500 miles with no music and stay sane. Or awake. And when you're driving, sane + awake = alive.) We did the tourist thing Wednesday night and Thursday afternoon, then threw my stuff into storage that night. I pulled an all-nighter (again... why is it that I've pulled three all-nighters since September and none of them was even during school?! Hmm, let's revisit my list of priorities...) cleaning the apartment and actually packing the stuff I planned to take with me, and then we left at 5 a.m. Friday morning--there was already traffic going from the city to the suburbs, wtf?!--to drive a total of 967 miles to Cheyenne, Wyoming. The crazy thing in addition to that is, I drove all but 200 miles of it. I slept for about an hour and a half in the middle and then picked up again a little ways into Nebraska. You can tell the vacation mentality hasn't really kicked in yet.

The nice thing about driving all that way the first day: we got to Park City tonight in time for dinner. I'll go to sleep soon and get my eight hours in. I'm looking forward to three days of skiing, not just one or two. I can spend my evenings walking up and down Main Street and reading David Sedaris.

Dude, it's about frickin' time.