i’ve received 90% of my contributions during work hours. apparently that’s when everyone’s on the internet.

a lot of people want to be anonymous.

minor anxiety attacks are on the rise. i’m not sure if it’s the going-off-my-pills thing or the can-i-afford-this-roadtrip thing. it’s probably the former. exercise seems to prevent the anxiety, though, so i’m seeing more yoga in my future.

my readers know a lot more about cars than i do. according to some emails i’ve received, i need to get the hoopty belt and the wonkerton looked at before i leave. don’t worry, i’m getting a triple-a membership.

i am not very good at excel or math or excel-math. this itinerary spreadsheet i’ve been working on has all these columns with cities and people and miles of travel and hours to destination. i was halfway through creating it when i noticed i had forty rows of data. “forty rows!” i said to maude. “that’s two months already!” a) two months would be sixty rows, not forty, and b) some of the rows are for destinations an hour apart, so sometimes i’ll travel through two excel rows in one day. crisis averted.

apparently i do not know how many days are in a month.

in my eagerness to plan my itinerary, i forgot about an old high school friend i haven’t seen or spoken to in years. she emailed to remind me that she lives in tucson and to tell me that i was welcome to stop by. if making this google map hadn’t almost crashed my computer, i’d update it to reflect the tucson detour. why does my computer find it hard to process google maps? it’s almost seven years old, that’s why!

when i make mistakes in my roadtrip moleskine, i really want to rip those pages out. i’ve done so a few times. the way moleskines are bound, though, every time i rip out a page i have to rip out its other half too, like a staple-bound magazine. if i keep up with the ripping everything will get loose and fall out.

the contribution request will be at the top of the page for a few more weeks (for a total of three). between now and then i won’t mention it in any other posts. i’m infinitely grateful to those of you who have contributed so far. your help in making this trip possible means more than i can say.