day one: getting there

    On the road again. By the time most of you read this, I will have departed for the annual "spring break" trip. Nowhere near as elaborate as last year's Oklahoma adventure, it has me heading in the direction of the ancestral homeland. If all goes well I will be on the road in less than an hour.
    My trip coincides with Nick's annual trip East with the guys. They were scheduled to take off (by car) at 5:00 this morning. If my sixth sense is right, they actually left closer to 5:11, because I woke at that exact time, shot out of bed like I'd been fired from a gun--I'd bet that they drove by my place on their way out of town and honked like crazy, knowing that I'd planned to leave early, too. I did get up at 5:11: got up, got a drink of water, and went back to bed.
    It seems totally unfair that today happens to be the day that my part of the world is launching the early Daylight Savings Time plan this year. I was at Fluffys last night, dropping off some "big laundry" and generally hanging out, and after I left Fluffy called to remind me to change my clocks before I went to bed. That was pretty hard to do, knowing that I wanted to get up pretty early. Hard to "lose" an hour knowing that I was getting less than 7 anyway, when I'm used to more like 10 on the average Sunday.
    But what's really unkind about today is knowing that, rather than spending it packing and schlepping and driving solo, I would rather be with the guy who's in a truck with 6 other people, by this time roughly halfway to Akron, already a little smelly (not him, but the truck!) and filled with cranky, sleepy people, less than halfway to their final destination.
    One of today's quotes of the day is from Mark Twain, and it reminded me of my feelings last year at this time. Good advice, though, for setting off on any adventure, or life in general. Until my next dispatch from the home country...
Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear--not absence of fear.