More than a month since the last entry. I'm not one of those "I need to update hourly so I can tell people about what I had for lunch" people. I write when I feel like it and, I suppose, I feel like it.

Much has happened and a little is new. I took a 5,000 mile road trip to Phoenix and back all by my lonesome and I liked it. I'd do it again in a minute, with about as much advance planning as I'd done this time. Which was very little.

I left on 23 November in my nice rented Dodge Intrepid and set out west. I chose the southern route as I wanted to go through Oklahoma City. A friend, Jon Mills, is a grad student at Oklahoma U in Norman, just outside of OKC. If I could make it there I had a free floor to sleep on. So in the course of a single day, I put nearly 1,100 miles on me in 19 hours or so of driving. I don't recommend it unless you're either insane or are stubborn or are really cheap. You get to decide which two out of three I am. Got to OKC about midnight local time and pretty much collapsed. It was a floor to sleep on, sure. But it was possibly the softest floor I've ever had the pleasure of collapsing on to. Got up the next day and treated Jon to his first Waffle House experience. I'm a big fan of 'em and firmly believe that people should really eat there once in their lives. The food is good, pretty cheap, and the people watching is superb.

Left OKC and headed west again, down Oklahoma and into the Texas panhandle. Let me just say here that Oklahoma City is as different a place as I could have imagined. Trees and grass everywhere, very standard midwestern architecture. Texas is exactly what I thought it would be like. A lot of open scrub land without much of anything between gas stations. The roads are well maintained and traffic was pretty light. They just needed to improve the speed limit. 65 is just too slow down there. I pegged the cruise at about 73 or so and settled back and listened to the CD and watched the world go by.

I stopped for a late lunch in Moriarty, Texas, at a McDonald's.