Befuddled Friday

Thank you to Unconscious Mutterings for the prompts.

Freak  ::  out!

Which, of course, I am doing, after my time spent in the Philadelphia Airport yesterday.  Still in the afterglow of a lovely and heartwarming award dinner from the night before, I checked out of my Reading hotel at 8 am yesterday, to enjoy the 1-1/2 hour drive (that stretched into two hours) to the Philadelphia Airport, to catch an 11:35 am flight back to Pittsburgh.  My mastiffs were squared away for the morning, I was due home by 1:30 pm, and I should have had plenty of time to work on my 10-page paper due Monday, and take care of Eleanor in the evening.  Delay, delay, delay, and not enough USAirways reps at the gate; and finally after another 1-1/2 hours spent in the Customer Service line in a different part of the terminal that was filled with people who were disgruntled, inconvenienced, and downright pissed, doing my best to fend off the line-cutters, who always view me as an easy mark (probably because of my size), and if need be, I would have taken them on rather than risk a riot sparked by the same disgruntled, inconvenienced, and downright pissed people I just mentioned; but back to my point, which was that I could get no relief from the Customer Service people and ended up spending 9 hours waiting around for my flight in the Philadelphia airport.  I wanted to prevent myself from falling into a bottomless depression, so I kept busy.  I got a manicure and a massage, window shopped, played around with gadgets in Brookstone without buying one, updated my handy-dandy Motorola Q smartphone with a cute Bluetooth ear gadget that flashes in a high-tech, know-it-all way, and allows me to talk without using my hands, and I had two iced chai teas, one cornbread muffin, 3 diet cokes, and a Chinese tofu dish with brown rice, finished three crossword puzzles, started framing my Contemporary Readings 10 page final project due on Monday, read the first part of Murder in the Cathedral, made eight phone calls, sent six text messages, was able to find a replacement for my evening visit with Eleanor, made arrangements for someone to check on the mastiffs who had been confined to their crates without a potty break for almost 12 hours, and took a nap in a white rocking chair.  I'm not even going to go into how, once on the ground in Pittsburgh, I waited 25 minutes for my suitcase that never came down the chute onto the luggage carousel, 10 more minutes in the USAirways Customer Service line, walked away (gratefully) with suitcase in hand, and let myself into my front door at 10:35 pm, only 9 hours and 5 minutes late, 14 hours and 35 minutes from hotel to home―all for a one-hour flight, or a six-hour drive that could have had me home by 2 pm.  Today I feel like someone tried to clobber me over the head, but I resisted, wearing myself out by popping up in different places, like those little Muppet-type creatures that pop up out of trash cans at the penny arcade, and the person with the mallet gets points for bopping them on the head and making them disappear into the holes from which they came.  Or, to put it more simply, I am mentally throwing up my hands, screaming, "What the hell happened yesterday?"

Open  :: Closed.

I don't feel like writing anymore.

Have a pleasant weekend, filled with peace and predictability.

From Louise