Here I am in Bensenville, Il, waiting for Final Fantasy XI and Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow to arrive. Currently, I'm sitting in a Starbucks (hooray for corporate coffee), which is itself located in a Dominick's, which appears to be a fairly upper end supermarket. In order to stay awake, I'm drinking coffee, typing in Notepad and listening to two Russian women...talk about stuff I can't understand, since I don't speak Russian. I think they're a mother/daughter pair. The daughter is really cute but is, of course, far too young for me.

The trip down was relatively uneventful. Picked up the truck from Penske and got on the road around 8:45. Lost radio contact with WUWM about 20 minutes further on, and scanned around until I found some music that didn't suck, which reminded me why I've eschewed commercial radio entirely. Seventy-five (Mapquest) miles later, around 10:30 a.m. or so, I pulled up. I've been told I made pretty good time, which is funny because the truck has a governor which kicks in at the ridiculously low speed of 72 mph and because I made a couple of wrong turns (fuck you, Mapquest), one of which put me perilously close to the vehicular bog which is traffic around O'Hare.

Jesus, fuck! I think I'm going nuts. The Russian mother/daughter team just left to be replaced by the Starbucks coffee counter woman, who is taking her break and is talking, in Russian, on her cell phone at the next table over.

(Note to self: research demographics of Bensenville area and figure out why so many native speakers of Russian are here.)

Okay, that's enough for now. I'm sleepy and I want to smoke and Perdido Street Station has taken this weird(er) turn, so I think I'm gonna go. Further bulletins as events warrant.