That's how you text-message and IM, you know. You use "2" instead of "too." I know this stuff.
Anyhoo ... I had planned to go to Des Moines Saturday night to write a short column off the Illinois State-Drake men's basketball game, seeing how both are 6-0 in the Missouri Valley Conference, Drake is headed into the Top 25 with a victory, good stuff like that.
But with wind chills the way they are around here this weekend, I lack the intestinal fortitude to be driving home 'round midnight tomorrow. Assuming the company car would even start after sitting outside at Drake for five hours or so. Thus, another time. Not that this moment in time will come around for the Bulldogs again even if they beat Illinois State, since they turn around and go to Creighton Tuesday. Creighton is not a place to take a new national-ranking. Or an old one.
Do any job that requires driving in the Midwest, and you have January horror stories. In 1985, I got the Iowa basketball beat at the Gazette. Oh, by the way, you'll have to drive to Indiana and Ohio State on one trip, and to Michigan State and Michigan on another. Hey, you're young, you want to make your mark, you'd drive to Nova Scotia if that's what was asked.
That Michigan trip was a doozy. The morning after the Michigan State game, I drove from Lansing to Ann Arbor. The weather was horrific. Icy. I spun on the freeway, did a 360 that would have made Tonya Harding jealous enough to have someone take out my kneecap, and somehow wound up back in the direction I was headed without going into a ditch. Alas, the guy driving the bread truck behind me had to do some skating of his own to avoid making a sandwich of me, so he ended up in that very ditch. I paid for his tow. Not a good day.
Two days later wasn't any better. I went to bed in Ann Arbor the night before and could barely sleep a wink because of the gruesome sound the wind was making. Then I began the drive all the way home to Cedar Rapids. Somewhere in southwest Michigan or northeast Indiana, I got a flat tire on what a Chicago Tribune headline proclaimed (I believe) "Coldest Day of the Century." Miraculously, it seemed, I recognized the flat shortly before nearing an Interstate exit, one which had a service station open on a Sunday and someone capable of doing what I couldn't, which was change a flat.
I drove the rest of the way back to C.R., then wrote the follow-up story from the Michigan-Iowa game the night before. The Hawkeyes lost in triple-overtime. That game, I can barely remember. The other stuff, if only I could forget.
I got bold and smart, or so I thought, the following year. I'm not driving to Michigan again, I said. OK, fly, the boss man said. So my flight to Lansing got delayed and delayed and cancelled in Chicago, and I ended up on something that made stops in two other Michigan cities before landing in Lansing. I listened to the tail-end of the game in a taxi to my East Lansing hotel from the Lansing airport. Mark Neuzil, then of the Quad City Times, handed me a box score a little later that night, and I called in the box to our office. So the Gazette got something out of that night.
The next day, Neuzil drove me to Ann Arbor for the Iowa-Michigan game the night after that. For some reason, I kept looking for bread trucks.