Today is the big day. We are off to Florida. But not until late tonight. Susan is driving us to the airport so that is going to make the evening handy.
Our pains at 1180 continue this morning. I came out of the building to discover that the mess that kept us from parking in front of the building yesterday turned out to be the city discovering that 1180 had created an illegal valet zone and had taken over the city’s parking spaces! So now the area where our valet is supposed to be (“supposed to be” is a relative term since no permits were filed with the city – according to the city – so the space are REALLY “supposed to have been” parking spaces all this time) is just regular, everyday parking spaces. Who knows what we are going to do now. Up until now the parking situation has been horrendous but now it is beyond out of control. Every day is an exercise is trying to get down our road which is completely blocked because of our building’s parking and then trying to figure out where to stop and get out of the car so that the valet can take it. Generally we end up blocking a side road illegally or blocking the bus stop or just stopping in the middle of the road adding to the chaos. It is a disaster and they just have been refusing to address it or do anything about it. And the situation is this bad with the building less than half full. There is no way that 1180 can handle having more people move in – they haven’t figured out who to handle the people that they have yet!
I got up at a quarter after five this morning and ended up having to respond to queries from work almost immediately. I got ready for work and did some work from home around six. Once everything was stable I ran into the office and got in around a quarter till seven. I am in early today so that I can leave early this afternoon.
I still have a ton of work that needs to be done before we leave for Florida. The biggest thing is work that I am doing for Brainbench. That work is fun but there is a lot of it and I would rather not be doing it while on vacation. That and there is homework that I have due Sunday night as well so that should be done before I leave today. Eeek!
Dominica bought celebratory bagels and took them into work with her today. She is so much happier now that she is CompTIA certified. Certified, a weekend without any homework and getting paid a comp day to go to Disney World. Does it get any better? She has been stressing a bit at work recently but I bet that she will be far less stressed now that the A+ is out of the way.
Our original plans got changed when Newark airport started postponing flights all day. Fortunately we are flying on AirTran and they were nice enough to call me at work and to let me know that the flights were going to be delayed so much (Newark claimed bad weather although the entire day was clear and pleasant) that we were going to miss our connecting flight in Atlanta. So AirTran moved us up to an early flight that had been delayed enough that we could make it. I called Min at work and we both took off as quickly as we could so that we could make our flight. It was about two o’clock when we both left our offices to rush to 1180 to do our final packing and get out to the airport.
We had to grab a taxi since Susan couldn’t leave work to drive us over to the airport (that darn “job” thing.) We got to the airport in plenty of time and left on the 4:34 flight at around 5:30. We got to Atlanta and had about an hour to kill before leaving there at 9:20.
We arrived in Orlando around a quarter to eleven at night. We took Mickey’s Magical Express to our hotel. Unfortunately they put six hotels onto our bus (ours being the only top tier hotel) and then dropped off all of the people going to the less expensive resorts (almost all of them being the All Stars) first. So our trip that was supposed to not top forty-five minutes took closer to two hours!
It was one o’clock in the morning when we got into our room. We opened the door to a pungent odor. It took a little while before we discovered (Min did the discovering – in just her socks) that there was some sort of leak and that the carpeting was all wet and moldy causing the odor. We also discovered a dirty tissue on the arm of a chair when Dominica went to sit down. Eww. So we had our room changed. The only thing that was available for tonight was a since queen bed with bunk bed option non-Savannah view room but at least it didn’t smell. We will be moved to another room tomorrow.
Our luggage did not arrive until long after we had gone to bed. It is supposed to take up to three hours after you check in before it arrives and ours just made it arrives just a few minutes before four in the morning. So we had to go to bed worrying that it might have been lost because these things do happen.