The Facts Were These:

Peter and Emily Stork loved their 2008 Malibu. It was the first vehicle they purchased as husband and wife, and while they had not set out to buy this specific automobile, it took but a brief test drive for them to decide this was the vehicle they would spend the first few years of their marriage traveling the country in. They named their new auto “Jesse White,” a humorous moniker meant to reflect the neutral color of the vehicle and the name of the Secretary of State whose signature lined the bottom of their registration.

The couple went everywhere in their beloved Malibu. Exploring Route 66, vacationing in picturesque south central Wisconsin and traveling ninety-minutes one-way just to partake in the delicious wonder that is Joe’s Italian Subs in Effingham. A young couple still without child, the two in their weaker moments almost considered Jesse White to be their baby.

On October 23, while Peter was traveling north on Illinois Highway Four, anxious to return home to his lovely Emily, a red BMW turned left into Peter’s lane of traffic, refusing to yield the right of way, standing in the path of the fast-moving 2008 Malibu…

and subsequently bringing a premature end to the life of Peter and Emily Stork’s most prized inanimate possession.

Eight days later, Peter and Emily found themselves at their neighborhood car dealer, staring at a different 2008 Malibu. Different, it was – it seems that their beloved automobile had not, as they thought, been merely the so-called “Fleet” version of the car, but instead the Malibu Classic, a line which fell somewhere between the old 2007 models and the newer, sleeker 08’s that had won a multitude of awards from a variety of publications. This new car, procured for them just days before by the sympathetic dealer, was the younger build. It was a design that did not bring Emily’s heart to a flutter in the same fashion that Jesse White had, but the couple agreed: they would take this new, more aerodynamic Malibu into their lives and try to give it the love they shared with their previous automobile.

Now all they needed…was a name.

The air conditioning is on. Much better.

Weather this year has been just crazy. Saint Louis has averages 37 inches of rain each year according to the Source of All Knowledge. So far this year they’ve had thirty. And we’re only fifty miles northeast of there. So you see. Temperatures have actually been cooler than average as of late, but the humidity is just unbearable.

And it never stops raining. Never. Literally.

Friday night Emily and I found our way to Lincoln Park in north Springfield to play Disc Golf for the first time. That adventure would have to wait two days, because the sprinkles started as we entered town from the south, the drizzle started as we drove into the park, the downpour started as we huddled in the shelter waiting for the rain to abate, and the tornado sirens went off about ten minutes later. After five minutes of hiding in the stone-built bathrooms, we split.

Then the hail came.

The Cardinals played the Pirates on Saturday night in a game that saw no break in the rain, drops pouring down for all nine innings as the announcers wondered why they were bothering to continue the contest. Duh, thought I, because it’s never going to stop raining! And I don’t think it has.

Emily, to me, a minute ago: “It’s hard to breathe around you.  You’re so awesome.”

Emily walks into the room.

Em: “Woo-hoo! I’m a girl! Look at me!”

Me: “You just pretty much summed up the feminine gender right there.”

Em: “What? What are you talking about?”

Me: “And you just summed up the rest right there. Now let me sum up the other sex.”

I grab…something…that my wife has two of.

Em: “Mean male!”

Paris, the desktop I built in December of 2003, has been giving me random freeze issues for the last year. Given that I only use her sparingly thanks to the laptop (”Chuck”) and the fact that she only seems to freeze up when idle (and I’m out of the room) I wasn’t too motivated to do much about it. Emily wants to use it for some of the programs she needs for her Master’s research, though, so suspecting the issue was with the RAM I jumped on Crucial to upgrade.

Four years ago I put a pair of dual channel PC3200 DDR sticks in the machine totaling 512 MB; at the time it ran me just north of $100. Yesterday at 1:30 PM I found a pair totaling 2 GB for $91. Not bad. I tossed $7 on top of it to get “two day delivery” and was given an estimated arrival of April 28.

At 2:30 this afternoon the FedEx guy knocked on the door. Hello, RAM.

I love Crucial. And so far no freezing.

We’re in Litchfield. I had to check my own website to remember if I’d actually talked about this, but then I remembered that I mentioned the radio station and Wal-Mart and several other things so I most certainly let the world know where we now reside. And I did. So yay me.

Perhaps my confusion results from the fact that I haven’t written anything in almost two weeks after I went through the painstaking kind of rough task of redesigning the whole shebang. Chalk the absence up to a combination of being busy and being lazy if that makes any sense. Doesn’t really to me, but there it is.

• I’ve been a member of the Route 66 Association of Illinois for a few years now but never got involved until January when Emily and I attended their quarterly meeting in Pontiac.  Now we’re involved in a big way, as after this last Sunday’s meeting in Hamel we’ve become the Montgomery County representatives for the Association.  It’ll be a good opportunity for us to promote the road and the Association at several festivals in the area, and it got me motivated to work on DigitalRoute66.com again - enough so that it may relaunch as early as Monday.  Shocking, yes. I’ll probably head out tomorrow to take pictures along the Carlinville Alignment as well and give Macoupin County some more love on the website before long.

• Being back on the radio is not as exciting as I thought it would be. It’s far more so.

• I picked the Cardinals to finish third this year behind the Cubs (1) and Brewers (2). I stand by my prediction.

Passing Lincoln in the car late last night on the way back from Laura’s Wedding:
Emily: “Lincoln’s really big.”
Peter: “That’s what Mary Todd said.”

Emily, randomly, later on: “Sometimes you don’t realize just how awesome you are.”

Didn’t even make that last one up.

Emily and I moved from Effingham to Litchfield yesterday, a migration that was, thanks in part to the help of her parents, Uncle Carl and cousin Tim, surprisingly efficient and not nearly as hard as we expected. Plus we have over two-hundred additional square feet of space as well as washer and dryer hook-ups. Yay us.

While the move was engineered to be closer to Emily’s family as well as in a (somewhat) decent place in the twenty-five county area she serves as a regional ecologist, the location was also chosen for its proximity to my new place of work: WSMI Radio.

I spent over eight years in radio (all at WHCO save a few month stint in college reading news at SIUE’s jazz station WSIE) and I loved every minute of it. (Almost every minute.) I made the decision in 2001 to get into teaching because it was something I thought I would also enjoy and I would not only find it easier to get a job but also procure one that paid more than the pittance that small town radio (or, very often, even big market radio) offers.

I was wrong on all counts. I didn’t like teaching; I loved it. But Illinois needs more history teachers like it needs George Ryan and Tony Rezko, and if you can’t coach, didn’t student teach at (or graduate from) the school you’re applying to or don’t have a man on the inside the odds of your resume being one of the few chosen out of the stack of 70 to 100 submitted is pretty slim. Subbing might help get your foot in the door, but it’s no guarantee. And if you do get there’s no guarantee it’ll be into a position that pays decently, at least from the start.

And as much as I loved it, I still loved radio more.

So with Emily getting a really great job and the subsequent ability to live anywhere in south Central Illinois, I applied for a part-time position at WSMI. Just walking in the first day to talk to the program director I got a contact high from the console, and the three hours I spent absorbing everything in the studio gave me a rush I haven’t felt from anything not named Emily in a long time. It helped that while WSMI is a small market, studio-in-a-cornfield stick it’s also a first class operation, and their studios are impressive. They get how to do great radio, serve the community and still make enough money to consistently improve. And I’m jumping up and down inside in anticipation over Tuesday when I get to start.

Four walks in a row now the Canadian National freight line has forced me to wait.

This time I crossed the tracks eastbound and saw the light of the engine coming from the north. Two hopes abounded: that I could loop through downtown quick enough to return before its crossing (since you can see several to a few miles north on the laser-straight tracks here) or that it would come quickly and complete its obstruction before I came back to the tracks.

It took its sweet time and blocked the sidewalk only a minute before my arrival. Of course I could change my route slightly to go under the viaduct a block south, but I’m just too obstinate. And that’s where all the freaks are at late at night anyway. Sure.

Growing up in Sparta, as I would lay in bed at night I could hear the trains roaring by along the Illinois Central tracks a mile to the south, and my overactive genius kindergartner’s imagination convinced me that the horns sounding as they flew over their intersection with Route 4 was the claxon of the Monster Truck going street-by-street to deliver all of the overnight monsters at the homes of Sparta’s children. I was less frightened by this idea than impressed with the precision the monsters used to dispatch the horror-bringers.

So I like hearing trains at night. It’s a comforting sound as the warning wail and the shudder of the tracks echoes through the silent city.

But I’m getting damned tired of the trains in Effingham.

I like to walk. Specifically I like to walk at night, often when Emily’s gone to bed and I can grab my ancient iPod Shuffle and bask in my peaceful constitutional. Effingham can be quite the quiet small town at night, and the busy stop-free intersections that tangle up pedestrians in the daylight offer easy passage under the watch of the stars, which all twinkle brighter than expected due to the small number of streetlights present in the town’s mostly safe neighborhoods. I stroll through newer friendly neighborhoods, past Saint Anthony’s hospital and along the classic downtown dotted with cute shops and the incredibly tasty Italian subs at Joe’s Pizza. Yum.

But on the west end of downtown I have to cross the Canadian National rail line.

This is the trail made famous in Steve Goodman’s tune City of New Orleans, and while the Amtrak cars fly quickly through town several times a day, smiling and tipping their cap as they hurry to get out of our way, it’s the long, plodding CN freight line that causes me ill. I can depart from our apartment, a good three miles northwest of the crossing, and hear the horn of a train beginning to violate my future path. No problem; it’s a good half-hour before I’m scheduled to be there, and this lumbering monster will by then be long gone.

By the time that thirty minutes is up, another train is already running through.

Every train in the world, it seems, passes through The Giant Truck Stop, and thus this happens far too often. This week in particular I took walks three days in a row at different times (6:00 PM, 11 PM, 10 PM) and each night I stood – twice on the east side, once on the west – waiting for the entire train to pass through.

Each time the train waited until I was approaching the crossing to storm through, timing its appearance perfectly so that I was just far enough to be unable to run across yet close enough to have to stand and wait from engine to caboose.

Every damn night.

Now I lie in bed at night and hear the trains passing by miles away, laughing at me.

I curse them.