10 to the 5th power

Today my car reminded me just how freakin’ long my commute is.  I bought it in April and it had 78,000 miles on it.  Today, less than 11 months later it flipped over 100,000 miles.

Yee-fricken’-haw!

Lets do the math:

22,000 miles/11 months = 2,000 miles/month.
Figure about 4.5 weeks per month gives us roughly 444.4 miles per week.
With 7 days in the average week that ends up as an average of 63.5 miles
per day… and that of course includes weekends.

The actual commute comes out to about 85 miles a day, round trip.

You don’t see the other subtle reminder of my commute… I was just about out of gas.

Fortunately(?) for me I was stuck in a very long traffic jam on 128 north tonight, between route 20 and route 3, when I hit 100,000 miles so I had plenty of time to snap pictures.  When you’re moving at about 5 miles an hour for an extended period of time you can get a lot done in between changes in the odometer reading.  This particular shot came during the rare chance to drive faster than I could walk.  I was flying.

On a totally unrelated note…

A number of years ago I went to see a band called Chelsea on Fire at the Linwood in Boston.  I seem to remember the show was a going away party for some one who was moving out of state.  The guy raffled off his car.  One of the other acts that night was Emily Grogan.  I was really impressed.  Not long after I found a copy of her record FalseOmeter.  Again, I was seriously impressed.

Then for years I heard nothing.  It was probably my fault as I was at a point when I was losing touch with Boston music.  I was just getting busy with other things.

Then along comes this silly little myspace.  I was looking at bands from Boston and I saw an Emily Grogan profile mentioning a new record called iO.  I bought it last night.  I’m trying to come up with a way to say, “WOW!” that accurately expresses how much I dig this disc.