Sheep Guarding Llama

I was up at eight thirty this morning with roughly two hours of solid sleep under my belt. Oh well, it isn’t like I have to drive anywhere today. And I feel fine.

I did some work right away this morning and then called Dominica to let her know what my status was. She had no idea what was going on at this point other than that I had sent an SMS message to Francesca late last night to let them know that I was stranded in Atlanta but we had no details.

Dominica, Joe and their parents left Texas by car at seven my time. Just a little later than they had been planning on. They are doing the less fun part of the trip where they lose an hour while driving instead of gaining one. That will make the trip seem to take that much longer. Dominica is very excited that I will be waiting for her in Rochester now.

I learned today that Schmap has two of my photos of Montreal on their shortlist to be used in their travel guide. That would be pretty cool. My photos are starting to show up in the weirdest places these days. More people see my pictures now than they ever did when I was working for the newspaper.

I got breakfast delivered to my room. Just the continental breakfast with pastries and coffee. I wasn’t very hungry for some reason. I am sure that I will get something more when I get to the airport this afternoon.

I also orchestrated a late checkout so that I can stay in the room charging my BlackBerry up until the very last second so that I am as prepared as possible to get stranded somewhere again.

I left the hotel at a quarter until one in the afternoon and took the hotel shuttle over to the airport.  I grabbed a quick sandwich at Plane Delicious and ate that while I waited for my flight.

Luckily today my flight was on time and we had no problems getting out of Atlanta.  I landed in Rochester a little before five.  Dad was waiting for me at the airport.  On the way home we stopped at Jay’s Diner in Henrietta for dinner.  This was my first real meal since my small lunch yesterday at the deli in Williams Tower and my first really substantial meal since the Melting Pot on Thursday night.

We drove back down to dad’s place and we visited for a little while and I got settled in.  It was pretty late and dad was getting tired.  Art had emailed me earlier to let me know that they were around this evening so I gave them a call and went down to the Ralstons’ to visit for a while.

At the Ralstons’ we played two games of Mayfair Games’ Settlers of Catan.  Settlers is a popular German boardgame that is reminiscent of Sid Meier’s Civilization for the computer.  It is a resource gathering and civilization building.  It is pretty easy to learn and a lot of fun.

We hung out until one in the morning or so.  But it was time for me to get to bed.  It has already been a long trip from Texas to Rochester and I am not very close to being in Newark yet.

I read some more of R. A. Salvatore’s “The Crystal Shard” before falling asleep.

Nothing ever goes as planned.  My flight out of Houston was delayed by half an hour.  I checked at the gate and they were confident that I would be able to connect to my flight from Atlanta without a problem.  But even when boarding in Houston we had to leave ten minutes later than the delay simply because the locals were unable to manage finding their seats in an orderly fashion.  The whole thing was so bad that the captain came over the public address system and asked people to get out of the aisle and to do nothing but find a seat as we were waiting for them and that we were going to be late getting to Atlanta because of it.

We didn’t get to disembark the plane in Atlanta until 10:50 Eastern Time – the same time that I was scheduled to already be pulling away from the gate a full concourse away.  We had arrived at a low “C” gate and my departure was from “D-2”.  So there was no way that that was going to be happening.

I asked at the gate if my flight to Newark was delayed or if I had missed it.  The woman at the gate said that the flight had been canceled and instructed me to report in to customer service.  So I trudged down to C-16 where customer service was located and discovered that mine was not the only flight canceled and that I had arrived quite late to the party.

It took over two hours to get to the front of the line.  Most everyone had been grounded because of the weather and people were already beginning to camp out all over the airport.  Everything had been canceled by this point and no one was flying anywhere tonight.

Just as I got to the front of the line two incredibly drunk guys in their twenties pushed ahead of the line that was, by the point, likely three hours long behind me and tried to get service.  I wasn’t about to let the hundreds of people standing behind me wait for these two yahoos who had been walking up and down the airport the whole time that we were in line catcalling the women in the airport and yelling at those of us in line for being whiners and wanting the airlines to do something for us.  So I called them on it and made AirTran send them away.  They weren’t exactly happy.  They threatened to attack me right there.  Verbally.  Actually threatened me in the airport.  With hundreds of witnesses including the AirTran staff.

But then again, we tried to get security to respond for half an hour and no one ever came.  The guys remained a problem and the airport never did anything about them and just let them be a danger to everyone and a total nuisance besides.  All of this effort of “increased security” and when something actually happens in the airport and we have a security problem there is no one to be found anywhere.  What a joke.  And in the nation’s busiest airport no less.

AirTran had no way to get me home to Newark until next week.  My only other options, being as far back in line as I was, was to fly to White Plains in a couple of days (how White Plains would help I have no idea) or to wait for Newark to become available.  But luckily I had been scheming in line for two hours and had a plan.  I had already heard that Newark wasn’t an option and since my flight was grounded because of an AirTran mistake and not because of the weather I had a lot of flexibility.  So I offered to take the next flight that they had to Rochester, New York instead.

AirTran was very grateful that I had a real solution to the problem and immediately set me up with a flight, tomorrow, to Rochester leaving a 2:53 in the afternoon and arriving just minutes before 5:00 pm.  They also set me up in the Renaissance Concourse hotel which is still on airport property making tonight much easier to deal with.  I will need to check out just in time to go check in for my flight.  Perfect.

I took the hotel shuttle over to the Renaissance and got checked in.  On the way over I rode in the shuttle with a girl who was flying to Newark but is currently living in Rochester while going to RIT for school.  What a coincidence.  Small world.  Two RIT students meeting on an Atlanta shuttle while neither was traveling to or from Rochester.

The hotel was great.  I got checked in and had to sign in to the office as I have been on call already for two hours and have been getting pages too.  So I got right to work.

I didn’t get much sleep.  First of all it was almost two when I got to the hotel and was checked in.  Secondly all  I have had to eat all day was a sandwich at noon.  No breakfast, a tiny lunch and no dinner.  So that kept me awake somewhat.  And then work and I just wasn’t tired.  I listened to Bill Bryson’s “Neither Here Nor There” for a while and finally fell asleep around four.

Dad called around five thirty to see if I needed picked up then or in the afternoon as I had been vague in my emails.  Then at six and six thirty some insane alarm in the hotel room when off.  And then at eight thirty I was simultaneously paged and had four consecutive fire alarms go off in the hotel making sleep no longer an option at all.  So back to work I went.

So that is my evening in a nutshell.  Boy am I glad that I have the phone chargers, a change of clothes, a book to read and my iPod with me!

Between the heat (not the temperature outside which is fine but the temperature in the house with the furnace blasting) and Oreo pushing me off of the bed I didn’t get very much sleep even though I was probably in bed for over ten hours. I am looking forward to getting back to my own bed in Newark.

I got up, showered and headed straight into the office without any breakfast. Not the best decision in hind sight since I hadn’t considered the fact that I have no idea how to find any food around Williams Tower without driving and I am certainly not going to be attempting that. So lunch may prove to be a challenge.

Like the rest of the week, today has been incredibly slow at the office. There is practically nothing going on at all. I don’t anticipate any real work until Wednesday at the earliest and very little likely until the following Monday.

I did the bill paying today. Ouch. Nothing hurts more than paying the Christmas bills. You would think that as a society we would recognize what a problem this is and do something about it but no, that isn’t how people think. But on the upside, I discovered that my scholarship from RIT came through after I had paid my bill last semester and now I have a nice credit on my account. So that is almost $1,000 that we had to spend that we hadn’t been counting on that we now have “back”.

For lunch today I waited until pretty late and then just went down to the ground floor of the building that I am in and went to a little deli there that people recommended here in the office for “easy” food. I just had an assorted cheese sub with lettuce and tomato. But at least they had toasted rolls. It was a fine enough lunch.

I volunteered to do the weekend coverage for the office this weekend. It was perfect timing as I have nothing planned for this weekend and will be home all alone. What better possible time to put in my primary coverage weekend and get a few extra hours of work? Dominica will be very happy about that.

I am going to post early this evening so that I don’t have to post when I return to Newark at one in the morning.  My flight leaves Houston at 7:20pm CST (8:20 EST.)  I will fly to Atlanta, have a layover and then fly to Newark.  It will be about one in the morning when I land.  I will be taking a taxi home from there.

Dominica did all of my packing today so I should be ready to go as soon as I arrive back in League City.  I am not taking any “extra” luggage with me as everything else is going back with Dominica in her parents’ car as they drive back to New York.  They will be taking the new GPS with them to try it out on the long trip.  So today I am just taking the bare necessities with me on the flight.

I am leaving the office at Williams Tower at 4:00 pm (CST) which is 5:00 pm back in New York which is roughly the end of the day and since it is a Friday during the freeze no one should be needing me at all.  I have a lot of traffic to fight through yet and I need to get to the airport.  We know how bad missing a flight can be 🙂

I slept in quite a bit this morning with Oreo. Dominica was up early and went out to hang out with people before eight in the morning which is very strange for her. Oreo and I were exhausted and enjoyed the chance to just snuggle and sleep for a while.

I am working today from Francesca’s house so I immediately set up shop and got to work. There wasn’t a lot of work to do today but there was some and it needed to be seen to.

The Wii was in use almost the entire day by one person or another. In fact, I believe that the Grices’ new Wii may have already seen more use just today than our Wii has seen in total use in the several months that we have owned it with the exception of its use as an emulated Nintendo 64 for Paper Mario!

I discovered from Chris today that Assassin’s Creed is expected to release for the PC platform in one or two months. This caused Dominica and I to decide to reevaluate our decision to get an XBOX 360. The only game that was really driving us to get the 360 at this time was Assassin’s Creed. The other games for the platform that I want are Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and Call of Duty 4 both of which are also available for the PC with better graphics and game play. So getting the 360 suddenly doesn’t seem like it is the best idea. So we are pretty sure that we are going to re-gear our plans and get a nice, new Windows Vista desktop to hook up in the living room dedicated to entertainment. We will probably get a 360 sometime but we can wait for the prices to fall farther and not have a large, hot, ugly device in our bedroom that we can’t figure out where to put.

So the new plan is to have the PC, Dreamcast and the Nintendo Wii in the living room and the PS2 in our bedroom. This is probably a better arrangement and has less overlap of systems. We have been without a serious PC gaming platform for a long time. Dominica’s desktop was used as a gaming system for a while but it was horribly outdated when we finally took it apart and moved her to just using a laptop. So now we have nothing at all. So in the end we will have the PS2 for night-time gaming and our back catalogue of classic Console RPGs that we really like, the Wii in the living room for “party” games and the PC for serious, hard core gaming as well as for casual web surfing and for movies.

Most of the day was spent with people playing either Wii or PS3.  None of the games were even slightly interesting to me though.  Either first person shooters on the PS3 or Carnival games on the Wii.  Not my cup of tea.

Tomorrow my plan is to go into the office at Williams Tower in Houston.  Probably best to escape the mayhem here.

I “turned in” on the early side and spent some time reading “The Crystal Shard” by R. A. Salvatore – the third book in the Drizzt Cycle.  Dominica is still working on “Sojourn”.  Several people are attempting to escape by reading around here.