“I have a really shitty proposition for you.”

Always great way to be greeted when you walk into work in the morning. Hey, at least he didn’t sugar-coat it. Turned out not to be so bad after all- some snafu had the folks in payroll running around like ants on a kicked-over anthill and they needed someone to drive to Little Chute, Wisconsin, or else our employees at our client there wouldn’t get their paychecks. No problem.

The company car is a nice new white VW bug, so the drive was a breeze. Two hundred miles, almost exactly. The day was beautiful, and since both driving and leaving the city are novel to me, I didn’t mind making a lot of people’s day better. The Wisconsin countryside was so beautiful, in fact, that it was almost dangerous- I’m distracted by the farmland, then the sunset, then the night sky. Madison and Milwaukee have some great modern rock radio stations, and when they faded out, I was able to hop between public radio stations to avoid any of their tedious political programming and seek out some excellent folk music. At one point I passed two giant wind turbines, spinning slowly and almost mesmerizingly. It was a fantastic way to spend a day.