This post could turn out to be a rant, but I’ll try to avoid it.  I woke up Thursday morning to the first day of our local NPR affiliate’s pledge drive.  “Call now and pledge…”  Great!  Ten days from now, I’ll get my radio programming back, in the meantime though I’ll be in a virtual news blackout.

I tried using my iPhone’s NPR app to listen to another station that was not undergoing a pledge drive, but as soon as I left the vicinity of our home’s wifi, I also lost the streaming audio and was never able to recover it.  I guess that there are a lot of other iPhone users who also listen to NPR and have already had this idea too.  Anyway, it was worth a try.  Maybe it will work tomorrow?  😥

The morning at work went well.  The epiphany that I had had on Wednesday continued to generate further progress.  It was only briefly interrupted by a call from Barbara, my walking buddy.  She called to cancel for the day.  “Better offer”, I asked?  “Well since you asked, yes”, she replied.  Thursday’s weather was perfect, so I mollified myself with the promise of going biking after work.  In the afternoon, storm clouds developed in the form of a certain individual.  He was as always, loud, opinionated, and boorish and in this instance he was also right.  This only made his other attributes even more grating on my nerves.  I left work in a pretty good funk.

In the car, I caught news on the radio that my route home was snarled by an accident, before it launched back into “Call now and pledge…”  It was a long slog home and by the time that I made it home, the street lights were starting to come on.  “Become a member!”  So I bagged the idea of going biking, but I got a pretty good rant out of it.  Oh, wait!  I was trying to avoid ranting.  Oh, well.

I should point out that I am not a member of Public Radio and have not been one for sometime.  So Ira Glass, if you are reading this post, bring it on.  I could use the extra publicity.  If as the NPR announcers claim, “Your pledge now will shorten this pledge drive.”  If my pledge would act as a free get out of pledge drive; then I would pre-pledge and miss the whole bloody thing.  But wait, I could do just that.  I could get an XM satellite radio subscription that comes with a complete lineup of NPR programming and avoid pledge drives altogether, but what would I have to rant about then?