Two Weeks from Takeoff

It is Saturday, June...where is that Hook family calendar?...June 12, and I'm trying to figure out the best way to document my first cross country driving trip. Marshall (and I) had great success using his Facebook account for our baseball trip last year, so I finally got myself a Facebook account. Desperate to keep my school life completely separate from the personal world of "social networking," I've kept off of Facebook and other similar sites. (The stories I could tell about teachers having their Facebook lives invaded by students and adminstrators at my school!) But now I'm there. I guess if you're reading this, you've already met Carbon Magoo, my Facebook alias.

Carbon Magoo is an alternate personality I adopted almost twenty years ago when Nanda, Morgan, and I drove from New Jersey to Sante Fe (where Morgan and I dropped off Nanda) and then back. He's got a poorly executed Southern accent, so I decided to borrow a little from my Texas life and call him a 1987 graduate of Houston's Stratford High School. Carbon went on to SMU and then hit the road for love and adventure. As you can see from his picture, he's aged a bit. The road hasn't been kind.

So now Carbon's got a Facebook page, but I don't know if that's the way to best document my trip. Part of what worked so well for Marshall and me last summer was that he was regularly taking pictures and updating on his Blackberry while I drove. I don't have a Blackberry, and even if I did, I can't update and drive at the same time anyway. I'll be all alone for most of this trip, you see.

So maybe Carbon's blog is a better way to go. Our family friend, Ellen Rutter, suggested I go with this plan, and she's pretty smart. This way I might be able to write updates at the end of the day or during rest stops. Of course, as this entry indicates, the blog route allows me to give in to my verbosity, something several members of the Hubel Floggers have complained about. So, I don't know...either way I've got to figure out how to post photos, and that's eluded me so far.