blogger in nowhere

ah, the by-now familiar blog pattern... my trusty blogmate is off having international adventures and eating mystery fish balls and setting off for points unknown and unpronounce-able. meanwhile, yours truly is back at home, doing nothing exotic, albeit pondering the important points of life with friends. (you'd probably rather hear about bangkok. last night over burgers, mb, ck and i debated which was more offensive: asking a non-christian to pray to baby jesus over christmas breakfast just to see what she'd say, or making fun of a man's inadequate grill. we're still not sure. but it's hard to gather lots of opinions on this one... as bikemyers said today in an unrelated but weirdly applicable conversation, "not many people have a good sense of humor about john the baptist.")

except that although i have gone absolutely nowhere special, i still have harrowing travel stories. last weekend mb and i drove to madison to snowshoe with friends before the last of the awesome piles of snow in southern wisconsin melted in record 60-degree-in-january heat. we had a fabulous time, and i can safely say that any exercise that involves romping around at midnight drinking jim beam in a plastic squirt bottle is not something that should be so easily dismissed by our many snowshoe nay-sayers. had a great time until sunday, when we were about to head back to chicago, the car wouldn't start. we called triple a: now enter lots of small-town retired men all conveniently taking the dogs out for walks around the neighborhood so they could eavesdrop on the musings of the towing guy, and there we were stuck with our car at mb's parents' place in the country outside of madison, with no repairs possible until monday morning.

we were both sad about missing a day of work, and even sadder about being foisted upon mb's parents for that sunday evening, which happened to be their 40th wedding anniversary... until mb's brother called us later that evening to report that at the very time we would have been headed back to chicago there was a huge 100-car pile-up just south of madison and the interstate was closed for hours. had the car started, we would have - at best - been stranded along i-90 with a totalled car waiting for the red cross to come find us a hotel and a wrecking crew. never have i been so overjoyed about a broken-down car! instead, we spent a comfortable evening with mb's gracious parents, an uneventful monday morning watching food network waiting for new spark plugs, and were back by monday afternoon in time for me to try out the new recipe inspired by my food-network morning (oooh, roasted poblano peppers with sweet-potato-and-black-bean stuffing!)

i'll take uneventful non-travel for a bit. but looking forward to the next installment from across the globe... living vicariously is good.