Post-waukee

I tried to send an audioblog entry three or four times yesterday from the long boring road between Rockford and Bloomington, IL but kept hanging up instead of hitting the approriate key after I had finished recording. It was like a recurring nightmare I used to have: I would be punching in a number on a pay phone because there was some emergency or crisis and I would constantly hit the wrong number, over and over. I stopped having those dreams after I finished grad school and after I had a cell phone, but trying to send in my audioblog was like those stress dreams all over.

So you didn't get to hear me tell you about the slender white wind turbines rising above the empty fields in central Illinois. Nor did you hear me explain that I had been in Milwaukee, where C. had some business to take care of, nor that I was stopping overnight in Bloomington, IL to visit with my diss director, who now teaches at Illinois State, and with my first MA thesis advisee, who teaches at Heartland CC in the same town.

And because I had no camera with me (yes, I know, I should have), I have no record of the sign in Atlas, IL that reads:

Eat Here Get Worms

Nor can I show you the rubble that used to be a Ford dealership catty corner from my old apartment building, nor the apartment building itself. (Though you can see the apartment building through the windows of Alterra Coffee. Look to the left and you can almost see my former livingroom window, where Kitty used to hang out and sniff the air as the coffee roasted:
http://www.alterracoffee.com/bigtour/tour4.html.)

But, really, everyone should take a road trip the weekend before classes end. Very refreshing. And I got to eat at Beans and Barley twice: once for dinner (black bean burrito), once for breakfast(blueberry granola pancakes). It's a couple of blocks from my old apartment (see above).

Columbia is nice, but I miss Milwaukee.

Update: Almost forgot a small anecdote, mainly for the benefit of a fellow blogger. My friend A. works security at a fancy hotel in Milwaukee where everybody who's somebody stays. And who should have stayed there recently but Bob Dylan? As he was coming in, accompanied by security, he turned to A. and asked, "Smoking rooms?" She assured him, yes. "And the windows open." Yes, she said, though it's true they had to break a small rule to make them so. And they could only be opened an inch. But no complaints from Dylan, so it seems an inch was enough.

Here ends my small anecdote.