I was awakened at 5:30am, which was bad because then I spent the morning pacing, waiting for Stephanie to get ready. We were on the road just in time for rush hour traffic in Nashville. The troopers were pulling over all the single-drivers in the HOV lane, and there were a ton of them. We escaped Tennessee, then Kentucky, then reached the hated wasteland of Illinois. It wasn’t actually that bad for me, because Stephanie took over driving and I zoned out. I putzed with the CDs, I cleaned the car, I didn’t sleep, but I pretended to in hopes I could even convince myself. On my shifts, I averaged between 80-85, and kept bumping up my time estimates; I had planned on getting home by midnight at the earliest. We managed to hardly stop at all, and were back in Minnesota by 9:30pm.

I stopped to drop her off at the parents’ house, and intended to run back out the door and home. But there was my mom, shoving food in my hands again. I can’t get away! I ended up coming home with protein chips, oranges, and a banana. Just in case I got hungry on the 10 miles to my house, I guess.