If you remember, the point of this accursed road trip was to pick of two of my friends to come work with me on Otis H. Basketry's new "bread power" project. Curt and Jocelyn are fraternal twins who founded the high school's Evil Robots Club in our sophomore year. They still make robots in their parents' garage; I'm not sure how often they come out of the garage, actually, but Otis wants to see if bread will yield more electricity if a robot adds the yeast, so off we go. Curt built a special robot with a chef's hat as a gift to Otis, which looks sharp. "It can cook, too!" he said, as he packed the bot into my trunk. "Robot oatmeal is gonna me your savior."

A lot of adjusting to do. Neither of my new travel companions has ever been out on the road before, and I've usually traveled alone, so I've been able to set the A/C and the radio to whatever I like. Now, we have to cooperate, which means I can't just put on public radio. Jocelyn had three new CD's to sample, while Curt insisted that the only way to start a road trip was to listen to his new 21-CD set of Great Speeches of the 20th Century. So we made our way down 101 listening to William Faulkner accept his Nobel Prize.

Now listening to: about twelve things

Photo by Don Solo via Flickr/Creative Commons