October 16, 2009

So I am back from my Big Geek Adventure. I decided to skip the social networking thing for a couple of days and kind of just go searching for myself while I was roaming around exploring. I saw a lot of leaves, had an incredible bike ride (in which I forgot the camera) and spent some time assessing where I am in my life at 41+ years old and where I want to go from here. I feel more grounded and complete than I have felt in a very long time. I have plans to be implemented and I learned a lot about myself in many different areas of my life. I knew I just needed to get out so that I would be able to clear out my head.

Yesterday I made the long trip home in one big chunk. I drove nearly 700 miles to get back home, taking 12 hours to do so. Traffic from Washington, D.C. to York, Pa. was out of control due to weather. Once I got north of Harrisburg, Pa. Mother Nature decided to throw her comments on the drive and I found myself driving in snow. The hilltops had about an inch of snow but the roads were just wet. The scenery was incredibly beautiful as I made my way through the twilight. The snow gave way to wet leaves above Scranton, Pa., by the time I was about an hour from home the roads were dry and the sky was clear.

The Jeep doesn’t accommodate the iPhone very well so I opted to flip around the radio for most of the ride. I found myself landing on a country station and ended up listening to country music for the entire 12 hours on the ride home. (That cheering you hear is from my mother.) I haven’t really listened to country since I left the radio station in ’04 but I really liked what I heard.

One song that all the stations played in their “new music” category was Lady Antebellum and “Need You Now” (YouTube link). I really like this song. I found the artist and title using the Shazam app on my iPhone to identify songs for later purchase. If you’re not familiar with Shazam, it allows you to point your mobile device at a speaker and take a sample of a song and then it will identify the artist and title of that song for you. You need to have an internet connection while you’re doing it. The iPhone app works brilliantly and allowed me to purchase from iTunes if I was so inclined. It also tweeted my discoveries, so if you were following my Twitter updates you’ll note that I was discovering a few country songs here and there along the ride. I reprogrammed my radio when I got back home and I now have the local country stations just one button away.