Fiat Lux

That's the door to door length of my daily commute now. 56 miles each way. I've just this week been promoted at work; given a salary bump, a better title, and more responsibility. All of this is good but the catch is ... the long commute.

Fortunately, it's a reverse commute. I live in San Francisco and the job is over the Golden Gate Bridge, up Highway 101, in the fringes of wine country - a town called Santa Rosa. Unless you live in the North Bay you probably never heard of it. If there's no traffic on the road,and I break the speed limits on the smoother stretches of 101 (Southern Marin is pretty curvy and you can't really drive it too fast), I can go door to door in an hour, more or less. On a recent Sunday afternoon, though, the trip took 2 hours thanks to a few backup-causing accidents and heavy traffic coming back to the city from wine country.

To help manage the drive time, I've signed up for a monthly subscription from Audible.com. Each month, I can download one audio book from their website and burn it to CD. This month I'm listening to Al Franken's great rebuttal to the Republican media machine, "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them". Even in the unabridged version, it will only last me about 2 weeks, so I'll have to rely on the radio and my CD collection to fend off boredom the rest of the month.

I'm seriously considering buying an iPod and an FM broadcast kit so that I can listen to the 6 GB or so of MP3s sitting on my hard drive through my car stereo system. Doing so would also allow me to download my Audible.com books to the iPod instead of having to burn them to CD.

So if you have suggestions for things I can safely do in my car to while away the time, let me know!