I've discovered that one of the most difficult things about blogging is deciding what to write about. I would bore everyone to death if I wrote about the mundane details of everyday life. On the other hand, if I wait for a truly earth-shattering event to occur, I may go years between blog posts, and it doesn't really make much sense to have a blog if I'm going by that standard.
Yesterday, Earl and I went to Nashville for a CLE seminar, and I thought some aspects of the trip were sufficiently entertaining to warrant a post. As a disclaimer, Ben has been out of town for a week now and I'm beginning to be bored to death, so this Nashville trip may have been more entertaining to me because of that (and because I was excited to be out of the office for the day). I hope you're at least a little bit entertained by it, though.
Our CLE program started at 8:30 Nashville time, so we had to leave Farragut at 6:15-ish Knoxville time. I should explain that time zones are the bane of Earl's existence, even though he's from Middle Tennessee and should have that stuff down by now. Let's just say it's a miracle we didn't leave Farragut at 10:30 and rely on the International Date Line to get us there on time (sorry, Earl, I had to include this - it's just funnier this way). Moving on...
The night before last, some pretty big storms moved through the state. Apparently they were worse in Nashville because a lot of the people at the seminar had stayed in the host hotel that night and were awakened in the middle of the night by intercoms telling them to move to the first floor so they didn't get blown away by tornados. On the way to Nashville, we saw lots of trees down along the interstate and several big interstate signs blown off of their poles. We got a lot of wind and rain in Farragut, but there were no tornado watches or anything (I turned on the TV to check when the storm woke me up). Unfortunately, however, the fact that there was no danger of a tornado was lost on my dogs, who were freaking out anyway. Thus, I did not get much sleep Thursday night, and it was very difficult to get up in time to meet Earl for our trip.
I was still pretty groggy when we got to Nashville and parked the car. Then, whilst attempting to exit the parking garage, we saw this in the elevator:
I'm not sure I could comprehend this panel with a full night's sleep, and I didn't even make an attempt running on just a couple of hours. Luckily, Earl is better with heiroglyphics than he is with time zones, and he was able to get us out of the garage and back to our car later without having to use the Help phone at the bottom of the panel. When we were leaving the garage, we saw this sign:
In case it's too small for you to read, it says, "For fast entry and exit mount transponder." We parked in this garage a couple of years ago and cracked up at this sign. I could just picture one of us getting out of the car and climbing on top of the gate machine in order to be able to leave the garage faster. I actually tried to get Earl to do that for a better picture, but for some reason he declined. Maybe I'm juvenile, but I find this hilarious.
On the way back to Knoxville, we saw this truck:
Frankly, I was a little bit concerned for my life in taking this picture, but I am nothing if not a dedicated blogger, so I risked my well-being to get this picture for you, my readers. This guy clearly has some issues. There appears to be a demon-gargoyle mural on his tailgate (I've got to congratulate him from getting away from the wolf murals so often favored by people who are determined to put murals on trucks, but perhaps he could've gone with something less disturbing); there is a skull with light-up eyes in his trailer hitch receiver (I believe the eyes light up when he hits his brakes); and he has skulls built into his taillight covers. Stay awesome, Nashville.
Finally, I must include one more story about Earl and time zones. Earl's car has a GPS feature that automatically re-sets the car's clock when he drives into a different time zone. This is clearly a valuable feature for Earl. When we passed the sign indicating that we were returning to the Eastern Time Zone, the clock in the car read 4:07. As we went by the sign, Earl pointed at the clock and said, "Aaaaannnnnnd 3:00!" If the car hadn't shown him that it was actually 5:00, he might've been two hours behind for the rest of the day.
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