Catchy Name Needed

The rental car co. was out of compacts so we're driving a minivan. The horror...

OK, this may get a little complicated.( Read more... )

Tuesday I slept late again. I think I'm catching up on my sleep deficit from last week. Then we went to lunch with Aunt Betty. She invited us on Monday. We went to Pullman Bay again, but this time we had breakfast (even though it was actually lunchtime by the time we got there). Aunt Betty talked nonstop. She is funny.

We hung around the house for a couple of hours and then we decided to go to the theater downtown and see "National Treasure" - it was fairly dumb, but not bad.( Read more... )

(I started writing this on Monday. I wrote all this on paper while I had nothing better to do so that's why it's so long - this is just one day, remember! And don't worry, I won't be insulted if you don't read the whole thing.)

I got up a little after 5:30 yesterday and we left the house a little after six. We discovered in the car that 99.1 is already playing Christmas music again. We listened to it for a little bit but they were playing really slow religious music - organ music, at one point, which must have been a Sunday morning thing because they never play anything but that really smarmy contemporary Christmas music most of the time - and organ music at 6am was not what I needed to keep me awake so we turned my CD back on. Normally I won't listen to Christmas music until at least December 1st but since I'm doing the CD exchange I've had no choice. (And the CD exchange was my idea so I've got nobody else to blame for that.)

We stopped to get gas in LaMarque and then went across the street to eat breakfast at Kelley's. (Kelley's Country Cooking is its full name, if that gives you an idea of what kind of place it is.) I didn't really think they'd be open at 6:30 on Sunday morning, but they were. They have terrific breakfasts. I just had a "normal" breakfast - that's how I think of it - meaning bacon and scrambled eggs. Rob had pancakes and EggBeaters. They also give you hash browns and monstrous biscuits but I didn't eat much of either one of those.

When we left there we could see what looked like rain up ahead of us, but we didn't hit it for a good while. Before we did, the sun peeked out behind us for a little bit and we saw a double rainbow. It stayed for quite a while, as rainbows go. Then we hit the rain. It wasn't too bad, though - I was mostly worried about whether the plane was going to be able to take off in all this. By the time we got to the airport, though, it had pretty much stopped.

I learned on my last trip that the place to park at Bush airport is called the City Economy Lot. (My mom's boyfriend is notoriously cheap and if he says someplace is the cheapest I tend to believe him, because he also does his homework.) It was around 8 by the time we got there and there were a lot of people on the shuttle, and I got a little worried about the terminal being crowded - but all the crowd, and I mean EVERYBODY but us, got off at the Continental stop, and we were flying American. American is in a whole other terminal and it was practically deserted. So no problem whatsoever.

A very nice elderly man at the curb checked our two bags, printed our boarding passes and pointed out the way to our gate. And it wasn't a mile to the gate, like it was in the Continental terminal on the way to Vegas - I assume these differences have to do with Houston being a Continental hub, while DFW is American's. I also really liked the way American boarded people - back to front - and the fact that the seats on the plane (I think it was an A80) were only 5 across instead of 6, so that we were able to sit on the side of the aisle with only 2 seats and neither one of us had to sit in the dreaded middle seat.

I called Mom from the airport - from the plane, actually, while people were still boarding - and she didn't really sound too good. Apparently she had another "spell," so she said - I think that means another small seizure. So when I say she didn't sound good I mean that she literally was having trouble talking. But I guess she's still ok, more or less. (Anyway, what was I going to do? Get off the plane?)

Neither flight was eventful. We didn't get anything to eat on the plane but pretzels - not that I was expecting anything more. We had two hours at DFW, anyway, so we had lunch there. (Rob had something-or-other from McDonald's - a chicken sandwich, I think - and I had Pizza Hut.) A two-hour layover sounds long but it goes by fast. By the time you get food and find the right gate half the time has gone by anyway. And actually I ended up on a computer, surprise (for 25 cents a minute). I couldn't get to TUS for some reason so I played KoL - I had some adventures I wanted to use up anyway. I stayed online for a little over 15 minutes and it cost $4.25 - I figured that was less money than I'd have spent in the gift shop on junk, which is where I usually end up when I have nothing better to do in an airport.

We actually got to Columbus a little early, about 4:00 (rather than 4:15), which was good because it took us freaking forever to get the rental car. First they didn't give us decent directions about how to get to where you pick up the cars, then when we finally found the right place, there were no cars. When we walked up, there were 3 compact cars sitting there, but a couple ahead of us took one, there was no key in the 2nd one and the 3rd one was locked up. Finally a guy went to get us another car and about the time we were getting into that one, another guy drives up and says that since we had to wait so long we could have a free upgrade to a bigger car. So we got our stuff out of the Cavalier and went and put it into a Buick Century instead. I'm not used to cars with all that automatic stuff, and this one had everything imaginable - I couldn't even figure out how to open the trunk!

So we finally got out of the airport around 5-ish. It took us a couple of hours to drive to Bowling Green but we made it with no problems, a little after 7. Everybody else was already there - Guppy, Joy, Roseann, karen_d & Mr Karen. (The only no-show was Shel, and she hadn't been heard from in a while so I wasn't really expecting her.) We stayed for a couple of hours. Some people had to work on Monday so I didn't figure it was going to go late. The food was sort of so-so - my experience is that Mexican food in Ohio is invariably bland - but the margaritas did the job. I had a couple. (We had already decided that Rob was going to be the designated driver since he's not much of a drinker anyway.) I was so tired that I'm not sure I was very coherent even before the margaritas, but oh well.

We (finally!) got to Rob's hometown about 10pm or so. Rob's mom was still up, of course, and Rob's dad (who always goes to bed very early) got back up for a while, too. They are very nice people, even if my mother-in-law does drive me crazy. (She's just a tiny bit anal.)

KoL is in nightly rollover so I thought I'd write for a few minutes. Yes, I DID get some sleep last night. I went to bed at 10:45 (after rollover, not completely coincidentally) and slept until 7 - so something approaching 8 hours of sleep! Yay me! I woke up several times but always went right back to sleep. What a relief.

I still feel like I didn't get as much done as I would have liked at work today. But apparently nobody else felt like working today, including the boss, so actually I was probably the productivity queen for the day, since I did get some work done, and nobody else seemed to do much at all.

I also burned CDs. I had this bright idea of doing an exchange of holiday mix CDs, which went over very well and we have 19 people participating. Unfortunately I failed to consider that mailing out CDs by the first of December meant I was going to have to listen to Christmas music in November in order to make the damn CDs. I hate listening to Christmas music before Thanksgiving. It's one of my unwritten rules. I think I ranted about this some during Holidailies last year - there just isn't enough Christmas music to listen to for very long. So if you confine it to a relatively short period of time you get much less sick of it.

I still have not started packing. That just seems to be meant to do tomorrow. Oh well. When I think about it too much I always overpack anyway. I also need to look and figure out what time we need to leave Sunday, because I don't really remember. I think maybe we're going to have to leave around 6 to be at the airport around 8. We don't get to Columbus until 4pm, and then we have to drive to Bowling Green to see some Suspects. Then back down the freeway to Rob's parents' house. Rob gets that part of the drive, because he's the one that was determined to get to his parents' house on Sunday. I said we should just spend the night in BG, but no. Anyway, it's going to be an awfully freaking long day, but we'll manage. We can rest up on Monday.

I said something about my mom's diagnosis in chat today, and they took it as a terrible horrible thing, which really wasn't how I meant it. I see it as a good thing - or at least, not as bad as it could be. We already pretty much knew it was a tumor by now, so "probably not malignant" is sort of a best-case scenario at this point. Well, of course "definitely not malignant" would be better, but still, not so bad. I should have my mom around and in decent shape for some time to come, and that's what I had been most worried about.