Keep those snow pictures coming!

Back when we used to live in Indiana we spent as much time as possible with our friends and family who kept us sane despite all the crazy happenin's back in that state.

In particular, one group of awesome folk we hung out with alot was named Eric, Maya and Rigby.

Here are the only pictures I have of Eric and Maya:



Rigby was Eric and Maya's son. He spent most of his time looking for the ball and asking where the ball was.

Here's the ball:


While Rigby was looking for the ball, Eric and Maya and Audrey and I spent our time looking for ways to move out of Indiana.

We talked a lot about how much we hated snow and how four months of dreariness and grey slush and constantly running the furnace made all the other things we didn't like about Indiana, like the crooked politicians, the coal plants, the arsenic in the air, the polluted water, the industrial pig farms, the KKK, etc, seem so much worse.

Then one day Audrey and I moved to San Francisco. A few months later Eric and Maya moved to Washington D.C. where cool people like Eric and Maya and Rigby are desperately needed.

Then two days ago Eric sent me this picture (below) of Rigby (left):


Eric is an engineer, as you can probably tell.

Then another person who moved away from Indiana, my sister Cyndi who moved to Dallas, sent me this picture of the weather in Dallas this morning:


Cyndi said only six of the 25 people in her office came in to work because of the three tenths of an inch of snow they got.

Cyndi of course went to work because it takes at least fourteen inches of snow to make a Midwesterner consider the possibility of not driving.

Anyway where I'm going with all this is that I've been thinking alot lately about snow and friends and family and how our friends the Daniel family in Chicago have been buried in snow for the past 3 months and how my dad and Audrey's family are still back in Indiana and how they have gotten a bunch of snow this year, I mean a BUNCH of snow, and how it seems to be snowing everywhere the people I know have moved to, and how it never snows in San Francisco, EVER!

Then I started thinking about how i just recently realized the band Journey is from San Francisco, and how I like a lot of Journey songs.

Then I thought I sure would like to rub this all in everybody's face somehow, I mean in a loving way.

So for all of you trapped in the drudgery of winter, wherever you are, here is a message of love to you from Audrey and me and Pico and Eli:

Yesterday we left our Indiana home.

Destination: San Francisco, California. Route: Highway 80. One Prius packed with one man, one woman, one golden retreiver/collie mix, one maine coon cat, one Juiceman, Jr., two Macs and whatever clothes would fill in in the crevices. Every boot was stuffed with socks. Every sock was stuffed with dreams.

This morning we awoke in room 113 at the EconoLodge, West Liberty, Iowa. There was, as they say in Indiana, "frost on the pumpkin."

"We're getting out just in time," Audrey said.

I walked Elijah through the field across the parking lot. He fertilized the frozen corn and did his part to make the barbed wire rustier.

When we arrived last night all we could talk about was pizza. But nothing much happens in a commercial venture kind of way in Iowa past 10 pm. Our one option was twenty miles away in Iowa City. I went for it. God protects a man on a mission. I made it back in time to savor hours of motel living. Blue carpet, poofy chairs, baseboard heat, HBO, bathroom fan with a built in heater, ice machine.

Every road trip from my youth culminated in a visit to the hotel pool with my dad and a visit to the ice machine with my mom. Mom would get a diet coke, a bucket of ice, return to the room and smoke a Parliament Lights 100 over a cold diet coke in a plastic cup.

I imitated the bucket of ice part last night just to hear the sound of crystalized water chunks bouncing on top of each other in a plastic bucket. My heart leapt with every tap of every cube and as I carried it back to Room 113, where Audrey, Elijah and Pico waited, I felt proud, and young again.