What a week it has been. I am totally exhausted. To make it even better, something has come up in DC and I am heading off to Baltimore this evening. I will be working in DC tomorrow and then flying into Rochester later in the evening. Min is stuck in Rochester for the day without me. She will pick me up from the airport tomorrow. This will be tacked on to my fifteen days of non-stop travel. This with only a five day break since I did six days of traveling with Eric last week. I am going to be so tired by the time that this is all over. We will see if I even manage to survive in one piece. Boy am I going to be looking forward to June. Maybe June will be a relaxing month.
I think that the cherry on top of all this traveling is that on Monday, May 20th, the day that I first get back, is my first day back at college! Oh joy. I am really going to be ready to settle down and study by then! What a schedule I have. During the winter it gets so slow and then by summer it gets so busy. At least half of my college time will be during the slow winter months.
So, we still don’t know what we are going to be doing about our house. Maybe we will know something definite sometime this week. Loopy, Min and I are trying to build a new place and Nate and Bob are trying to keep the old one. And the three of us need a place for a little while while we are building the new place. So, we haven’t yet decided what it is that we want to do. The easy thing to do would be to stay in the house that we have now for another year but that commits us all to so much money that it is prohibitive. Especially with the rent going up another $100 per month in August. It is going to be really rough. Unfortunately, we don’t know if any of us would be able to find anything better for the short term anyway. We have just been up in the air for too long. I think that we are going to decide to spend another year in the house that we have now and Loopy, Min and I will prepare for building a house in the spring. I hope that Nate gets his butt in gear and starts looking at getting his own house too. He knows that he is going to be in Ithaca for a long time and he could save a lot of money by buying a place of his own. But, he did just buy that new Ford Explorer, so that will make it pretty hard for him.
Eric might actually be able to go to Washington with me on Monday. I am sure that he is excited. Another trip out of town. Just what he has been looking forward to. Working in DC is always fun. I am being sarcastic.
Well, here is a new one. I am writing the rest of todays updates from 30,000 feet. I am in the plane on my way to Baltimore and Min is on her plane on her way to Rochester (Ra-cha-cha for Nate.) I read the book that I brought with me and I have forty minutes left of the flight so I figured that this would be the absolute perfect time to do some writing for the site. Min and I ended up being really lucky and we flew out of the same concourse from Atlanta from gates that could see each other and we had the same departure time. I even saw her plane sitting behind mine on the runway as I took off. AirTran has been treating us great. I am flying with them again tomorrow. Maybe I can write tomorrow’s update from the air as well.
I am hoping that John is going to be awake when I get to Baltimore. As of now, he thinks I am getting in around 11:00 pm but he doesn’t think that he can pick me up. So, I have no ride, in the middle of the night, in Baltimore. And I don’t have my house keys with me because I wasn’t expecting to be coming this way. So, if he doesn’t wake up when I call, I have to rent a car (good luck) and drive to a hotel and then be up and ready to go at 6:00 am in the morning. After having driven in to Annapolis. And I don’t have Wilfort’s cell number or I would try to crash at his place in the city but I can’t do that either. So, I may just be in pretty rough shape in an hour or so. I hope that things go more smoothly for Josh picking up Min in Rochester.
While I have the time to think about it, I am going to announce our May, 2002, Llama of the Month.
THE OFFICIAL LLAMA OF THE MONTH AWARD GOES TO ANNE KOPLINKA-LOEHR!!!
Anne takes our Llama of the Month award after having created our most popular site section – The Anne Diaries, as well as having contributed our third Letter to the Editor. Anne contributes more material to this site than anyone else and is one of only five people who have contributed text to the site. Anne, unfortunately, was unable to be at the Llama awards ceremony since she is in Belgium, currently, but we hope to have her back in the good ‘ol US of A in just a couple of months. But, we will hardly get a chance to see her and she will be scooting right off to exotic Wisconsin for college. What a change that will be from living in Europe for a year!
I am very excited about my flight. Both Min and I, on our second legs of our trips, managed to upgrade to Business Class (First Class, basically.) This is the first time that either of us has been able to do so. It is very nice. The seats are much more comfortable and you have so much space. Plus you get two wet drinks for free. That is worth eight dollars right there. Plus, because you aren’t touching the person that you are sitting next to, you don’t have to talk to them if you don’t want to.
Well, I am now arriving at BWI and have to stow my computer. Until tomorrow…
Ok, I thought that that was the end of my writing this evening but apartently, I was wrong. I landed safely in Baltimore, got my luggage and rented an Intrepid from Thrifty and checked in with Dominica who landed fifteen minutes after me. Josh picked her up safely and they are in Rochester now. I headed down to Annapolis to the condo. I am at the condo now. Only, I don’t have the keys with me because I wasn’t supposed to be here right now so I am sitting on the front steps waiting for John to get here to let me in. So, I am at least getting a chance to enjoy the night air. It is so quite out tonight. All that I can hear is the gentle rustling of the trees and the sound of my fingers on the laptop keypad. It is a lot nicer here than in Houston. Probably around 80 degrees. NY is in the seventies but this isn’t bad. I am looking forward to some cool weather though. I need a break.
Loopy stayed home from work today so that we could get our air conditioner installed at the house. They put it in at 8:00 am. Loopy wished that they would have put it in a little later in the day. If he was going to take the day off of work, it would be nice if he could have slept in instead of getting up half an hour early. But at least we have AC now. It was going to get pretty unbearable pretty quickly. I can’t live without AC for any length of time and neither can Loopy or Min. I need it cold. I don’t think that they have had an opportunity to try out the AC yet to be sure that it works. But I am sure that we will have a chance to use it during the next week or so.
Loopy got the chance to play with his new computer today since he was home all day. He is still very excited about it. He also has the new Star Wars game, Jedi Outcast. He and Bob installed that this evening and have been playing it against each other. Bob said that it was really cool. I will have to give it a try when I finally get home. It is built on Quake III but it uses light sabres and what-not. Should be fun. I will have to wait until I have my new computer together.
It is now a quarter after midnight and I am still sitting outside. It is starting to rain. Just a light rain. There were some thunder storms out to the west as we flew over Virginia. We could see them flickering over the Shanendoah Mountains. I called John at 10:40 to let him know that I needed him to let me into the condo. I have a feeling that I am going to be out here for a long, long time.
Well, with me getting stuck on the airplane with nothing to do and now being stuck outside with even less to do, I might manage to make the longest BLOG entry ever for SGL. Today is definitely long. If I could just get to the other side of this door, then I could upload today’s update and get to bed. The worst part is that John wants me into the office at 8:00 am and that means that I have to leave here by 6:00 and so you can guess what time I will have to get up in the morning. And to top it all off, I have to do some laundry so that I will have something to wear tomorrow. Let me tell you, it is awfully tempting to head down the street to the Comfort Inn and get a good night’s sleep while I have the chance. Hmmm….
The rain stopped. It was just a quick shower. The air is a little cooler now, probably in the seventies. I did get a chance to talk to Bob while I was looking for my luggage at the airport and we are all pretty sure that we are going to tell Lifestyle Properties that we are going to keep the house that we are in. In fact, I am going to call right now and leave a message saying that we are going to take it before I forget and while I have all the time in the world. At least I can use the time that I have wisely.
I keep hearing cars driving by and I keep hoping that it is going to be John. My battery is just about dead and my butt is starting to hurt from sitting on these metal stairs. Ah-ha, he has just pulled in. This is my official good night from the longest BLOG day yet. Goodnight.