aarrRRGGHHHHH!!!!!!!

It is Tuesday, Sept 7th.  Right now I should be in the car with Tramp after a tearful reunion of hugs and licks and squeals of delight.  I should be on my way to Cookeville, TN, a waystation on my route to Asheville.  I should be sharing my feelings with Tramp about this past weekend and feeling her empathic support.  I should be feeling a sense of moving forward.

I should be.

Instead I am in an ugly Marriott hotel (I think that is a redundancy) at the Houston airport.  A tropical storm sent rain and heavy wind through this city this morning.  The airport was closed when my flight was a couple of hundred miles away.  We flew in place for an hour.  By the time we landed and I got to my connection into Nashville, the plane had gone without me.  The agent could find NO SEATS on any flight on any airline for the rest of the day  today.  My only option was an early morning Continental flight tomorrow to Dallas, a change to American there and then, with any luck at all, I'll arrive in Nashville tomorrow afternoon.

I called dogtopia and let them know I won't be there today.  I changed my hotel reservation in Cookeville.  I called the people in Asheville to see if they would still have any availability for me for the weekend.  I wrote my friends in Lewisburg and Guilford about coming a day later than planned.  So many disruptions in other's lives all because of bad weather in Houston.   And all because I chose to sleep half and hour later and take a Continental flight through Houston instead of a Frontier flight through Denver.  Here's where a professional would have helped.  Travelling Rose would never have let me make that choice.  She would have checked weather and known it was a risky route.  But me?  I just thought about an extra 30 minutes of sleep.  Well I've learned a lesson there.  I've also learned that, when on the first leg of a connection, a bad seat toward the front of a plane is better than a good seat at the back.  I don't know if I might have made my connection if I had been one of the first people off the plane, but I do know it took a long, long time before I got off this flight because I was in the very back (where I hoped the middle seat would stay empty - wrong again!)  Another lesson worth remembering.

One good thing came out of this disappointment.  As I dropped off my rental car at 6:30am, I discovered a box of photos in the trunk that I had totally forgotten about.  Ed had plucked these photos from his grandfather's apartment and asked me to take them home and have them digitized.  Sterling and I totally forgot they were in the car trunk when we returned to his Dad's home and arranged for other boxes to be shipped back to us.  I should have consolidated my box with Ed's box in the trunk.  But I forgot about it.  And I didn't think about it again until the rental car agent discovered it  this morning.  Luckily we were able to find a large shopping bag and we put the box in it and I was able to carry it on the plane with me.  That meant that this afternoon, this rainy awful afternoon in this ugly Marriott hotel room, I was able to sit with this box of photos.  Chip as a boy.  His kids as infants.  His Mom and Dad, young and healthy and in their prime.  Sterling as an infant, as a long haired radical, as a Republican!  I spent hours with these photos some of which I had seen before; many of which were brand new to me.  These photos kept me company.  It's not such a bad thing to do on a rainy day, on any rainy day, nevermind one when your stranded in Houston.