Tuesday, February 5, 2008

Ohhh Possum, Possum.....POSSUM!!

Not a ton of people know it, but its very evident to my wife, who has different musical tastes than I...I am a fan of jam bands. I like the Dead and most subsequent bands that formed from the Dead, as well as Phish and of course Dave Matthews Band, though they've gone a ways from their jam band roots. An adventure last night reminded me of one of my favorite songs by phish. Click "Watch" and "Possum."By the way, my good friend Kyle Gentry did the Coney Island illustration for Phish. Send him some work if you need some illustration done... And now on to the adventure that sparked "Possum" playing in my head.

My wife and I wanted to have a date night last night. I came home and we napped from 5-7PM because we were both exhausted from the day/night before (what with the Giants kicking butt and all). We woke up and went to dinner at Bennigans, and then I was reflecting on how I miss seeing the stars, living in Orlando you might see a few of the billions of stars that are in the night sky. We decided to drive out of town to some remote road where there was less light pollution so we could see the stars.

If you're familiar with central florida roads, we took the beachline toward Cocoa, and got off at the 520. I decided the sky looked darker heading toward cocoa so we kept heading that way, and after a few miles came across this road that had an old beat up sign that said "St. Cloud" and had an arrow. Didn't say how many MILES to St. Cloud...

For the next 30 miles at least, we can count on one hand the amount of cars we saw. We saw deer on the side of the road, which is always fun at night, to see little eyes glinting in the headlights. And the sky was really dark, you could see a lot of stars. I had hoped to pull over to shut the car off and hang for a few minutes looking at the stars, so we pulled off in this one spot, but as we did I noticed this possum sitting in the middle of the road, still alive but it had been hurt. Anne felt sad, I would have helped it but didn't want to get bitten and infected with rabis... So we kept driving and at one point I started to fear for a gas station, but luckily we finally ran into 441 south of st. Cloud near where Narcoosee Rd comes in. It was just a great evening to be with my wife, and was comforting and reassuring to know there are still places within 1 hour of our house that we can get away to see millions of stars, deer, and acres of undeveloped land. Even if it is flat as a pancake. But Oh that poor possum!

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