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So I decided on audiobooks of the Jack Aubrey series (Master and Commander etc) for the Houston trip. I'm a bit tired of the music on my iPod and a ripping yarn sounds like just the thing for drivetime entertainment. They're 12-15 hours each, so three of them will do pretty well at filling the 45 hour trip.

The only problem is the cost. iTunes music store has all of them, for $35-$45 each! I think that's kind of outrageous, considering the printed books cost $10. Amazon.com falsely advertised unabridged audiobooks for $8.75 each, which sounded great. But when you follow the links it turns out they're abridged and you can only get one at that price. What a ripoff!

On the other hand, by joining Audible.com I can get two of the unabridged books for $23. And according to Alicia I can get a Chapel Hill library card for $10, and they have the first book in the series on CD. So it looks like I'll be able to get the first three books for about the cost of the paperbacks.

If this works out I'll keep the Audible.com membership (2 books a month) for the next few months. I've got a lot of art car trips ahead of me this summer.

Is there anyone with a Chapel Hill library card who would do me a huge favor? Since I'll be driving to Houston alone, I want to take some audio books with me. Unfortunately, books on CD are expensive, and the Durham library has very few.

The Chapel Hill library seems to have a better selection, but they don't give library cards to non-residents. If there's anyone reading this who'd be willing to go to the library and get audio books for me, I'd be eternally grateful.

On the bright side, my pre-trip library visit did yield a nice big stack of regular books. I always take more books than I can possibly read so that I'll have choices to suit any mood. This time I've got Dan Savage's new book, a couple of gardening books, two novels by Poppy Brite about the New Orleans restaurant biz, Miss Manners' wedding guide and a sociology book about weddings for balance, and a deliriously trashy novel about the cast of a soap opera "written" by Finola Hughes, who generously credited her ghost writer on the front cover. Not from the library but also on the packing list are Baudolino by Umberto Eco, and The Book of the Long Sun by Gene Wolfe since I just finished The Book of the Short Sun and now I want to go back and make sense of things.

I think that pretty much covers all my possible reading moods. I'm not taking anything too highbrow because I know I'll be too tired to focus on difficult reading. Art car trip books need to be relaxing, not challenging. My worst mistake was trying to read The Last Temptation of Christ on a previous Houston trip. Brilliant book, stupid idea to read it under those circumstances. One night I found myself reading the same paragraph over and over, unable to focus long enough to figure out what it meant. Even the Eco is probably too much, but hope springs eternal.

My packet arrived from the Houston parade! It's full of all kinds of glossy color handouts, and we even get laminated badges. They must have good funding this year. Which makes me wonder why there wasn't anything in there about a travel reimbursement. I wrote to one of the organizers to ask about it, but I think if I was going to get something, it would have been in the packet. I guess I didn't qualify for anything this time. Bummer.

My line-up number is 41. I was actually expecting a lower number since I turned my application in so early. I got it in before the official announcement, because a Houston local posted to the artcarz list and I filled mine out right away. Maybe the first 40 people were all either locals, or even more on the ball than I was.

Still, it's great to be so near the front of the line: for one thing, I think the spectators are more excited near the beginning of the parade. Also, the closer to the front, the less chance we'll get tangled up in any breakdowns or logistical snarls. Plus, we can pull over at the end of the route and watch all the rest of the cars go by. So we get to enjoy the parade as participants and as spectators!

There are a bunch of maps in the packet, but I'm going to print out my own maps too. Houston is a fiendishly hard city to drive in. We get horribly lost at least once on every trip. But this time will be different!

Let's not talk about how crap the past 24 hours have been, or how the next are going to be. Instead, here's some good news: I got my route information for the Main Street Drag. This is the daytime event where we drive around in small groups visiting Houston Schools. This year the staging area is at the zoo, which sounds cool except that of course we won't actually get to see the zoo.

Undersea Mah Jongg is in group 4, the Eels, and we're going to: Grady Middle School, St. Theresa, The Lighthouse Center for the Blind, River Oaks Elementary, St Luke's School. It sounds like a great lineup. No high schools, which is good because the high school kids tend to be too worried about looking cool to risk any enthusiasm about the art cars. And the Lighthouse Center was on our route in 2004, that was a wonderful experience.

Now, the bad news: the event starts earlier this year. In previous years we had to be there at 9 and we rolled at 9:30. Which schedule was repeated on the website. But the email I just got says that the lineup begins at 8, and the first group rolls at 8:45, with subsequent groups leaving every 5 minutes. We're in group 4, which means we'll be leaving at 9:05. (And unlike many art car events, my experience of the Main Street Drag is they roll exactly when they say they're going to roll.) We have the Art Car Ball the night before, so getting out to the zoo that early won't be easy. Still, the staging area is our first opportunity to see the cars in daylight. So I do want to get there early enough to see the cars and take some pictures. Plus, they usually have some kind of free breakfast, even if it's just bagels.

The email included the CC list of everyone in our route. I only recognize one of the addresses, but it's one of my favorite Houston people: Brian of the Santa Claus Car! He's also the president of the Houston art car club, so it's possible they just CCed him because of that. But I really hope he's in our group. It's a long event and having someone cool along on the route makes it a lot more fun.

I've been playing around with the new Google Calendar to help plan the Houston trip. It seems to be almost exactly like iCal in look and functionality, with one major additional feature: If you provide a location to an event, the calendar will link to a map of that location, and directions to and from that location. You don't even have to provide a street address for most businesses; "Jacques Imo's, New Orleans" worked great.

I think this is going to be a huge help in planning. I entered everything I have to do and everything I want to do. Now I can figure out how to get to each event and how much time I need to schedule for getting there. It's a bit sobering to see how tightly scheduled the entire trip will be. In fact I had to adjust my times on the day I drove from New Orleans to Houston. I had given myself time for a leisurely breakfast in New Orleans, but when I saw it all blocked out like that I realized that I would make myself late for the out-of-towners welcome dinner, much less have time to check into the hotel, shower and so forth.

(Knowing how long it will take to get from place to place has tripped us up on every previous Houston trip. We always end up late to the Art Car Ball because we underestimate the travel time, and/or get lost. And don't get me started on the night we spend driving all over the damned city looking for a fire extinguisher, because we stupidly left the hotel without getting clear directions to a Wal-mart.)

Seeing the schedule all blocked out also makes me realize that finding time to eat is going to be a problem. On both Thursday and Friday we're not going to have an opportunity to eat lunch until after 2pm, and then there's another event at 7. I suppose we'll have to eat a snack before the evening event and then plan on a late dinner. If we don't plan that just right we're going to be miserable at the evening event. At least, I will.

Of course I could do all of this without Google Calendars. Like I said, it looks almost exactly like iCal, and because it's still a beta I found entering new events a bit clunky. Especially the times; it had a tendency to kick me out of the entry window while I was trying to enter or change a time. I was also disappointed by the publishing options. I thought it would let me publish it to a web page, so that anyone (that is, anyone who cares) could see my calendar in all its overbooked glory. But actually the only publishing options are to iCal, or to an XML feed. Neither of which do the links to the maps, which is the coolest part. Plus, you can't make a calendar public without adding it to their public search function. Since my calendar refers to a trip away from home, and I couldn't figure out how to remove my real name from it, that seems like it would be really stupid.

On the other hand, publishing to iCal will be helpful for Georg and me, in case we need to check the schedule and we're not online. Too bad it doesn't have enough integration with iCal to let us update events there and have them show up in Google. And Google Calendar does have an "agenda" view, not available in iCal, that I like a lot. Georg says he thinks Google Calendar will be a boon to PC people who are stuck using Outlook, which he hates. (I've never used it so I don't have an opinion.)

In other travel notes, I realized that I made a logistical mistake: Instead of stopping in Atlanta like we usually do, I decided to drive a bit past it and stop in nearby Newnan, GA. That shortens the GA to LA leg of the trip by about an hour, giving me a little more time to hang out in New Orleans. Seemed like a good plan, unfortunately I didn't realize that this also means I'm going to have to drive right through the middle of Atlanta during rush hour. Twice: in the evening on the way out, and in the morning on the way back. Dang.

Just got back from Staten Island. The weather was bad and the circumstance was worse. At least the traffic wasn't much of a problem.

But enough of that. This summer is going to be busy with lots of travel. First up is the Houston TX art car parade. This is the biggest art car event in the country (and as far as I know, the world). It's crazy, wild, absolutely grueling, and I wouldn't miss it for the world. Here's the schedule:

• May 8: drive from Durham to Atlanta.
• May 9: drive from Atlanta to New Orleans. Dinner at Jacques Imo's.
• May 10: drive from New Orleans to Houston. Welcome out of towners party that night.
• May 11: pick up Georg at airport. (He can't drive with me, because he already used too much vacation.) Art Car Ball -- a loud, long party -- that night.
• May 12: Main Street Drag from 9-1, which is the tour of schools. I love this, though it's one of the more draining events. We drive all over the place in small groups, and we never know where we're going, and there's no food or water or bathroom. You'd think the schools would let us use the bathroom! Some of them don't even have any shade, we just stand in a parking lot in the sun until it's time to leave for the next school. But if you bring your own water and snacks it isn't so bad. That lasts until 1 or so, then they give us red beans & rice for lunch. Then we have a couple of hours off to rest, and there's some new event that night. A seminar or something, I'm not sure.
• May 13: the main event! We have to be there at 9 to display our car, and the parade starts at 1. There's an after party, then we have a dinner break and on to the illuminated cruise that night. The illuminated cruise is one of my favorite parts of the weekend. It's basically an unlicensed parade: the cars get themselves all lit up and then drive around the city honking at people. Most of the cars use Christmas lights, but a few have open flame jets on their cars! And last time one of the cars was towing an open flat-bed with a live band on it.
• May 14: they have a barbecue at the Orange Show, but we always bail on that. Drop Georg at the airport in mid-morning, then drive to New Orleans.
• May 15: Probably driving to Atlanta, but I may decide to spend an extra day in New Orleans.
• May 16: Home.

I think I'm going to skip the webcasting this year. It's always such a huge hassle, and just doing the same thing again doesn't seem worth the effort. This time I'd like to enjoy the parade and not have to worry about tech issues (and guarding the car) all the time. Besides, if I'm not using my phone as a cell modem, I can use it as a camera and post photos to my site in real time.