Safe in San Diego

Sorry for the lack of post yesterday. Here's what I was up to:

I drove to Tiffy's house, then we went down to O'Hare to catch our flight to San Diego. Tiffy had gotten me a window seat and an aisle seat for herself, so she was avidly watching the standby list to make sure nobody would be sitting between us. (Since she travels so much, we got slightly larger seats, not first class but better than the regular ones.) She was very hopeful that nobody would be between us; however, just as we had settled in our seats with my Famous Hat sitting on the empty seat between us, a dark lady with bleached blonde hair burst onto the plane trailed by her middle-aged twin and a preteen boy. She looked at the available seats, told her mother (?) to sit across the aisle in the middle seat, and guessed that two twenteen-something women would be a safe bet for her little boy. She told him in a foreign tongue to sit between us, and I asked in Spanish if he spoke any English, but he replied in English that he was Turkish. However, he was studying Spanish in school, so we sometimes used that to communicate.

I am terrified of takeoff, but I had brought a word game puzzle magazine to distract me, and the boy was fascinated by it. I turned to the sudoku page, since that does not require any grasp of English, and he quickly caught on and helped me solve a puzzle. However, he spent most of the flight sleeping on my shoulder. It was a long, hot, boring flight, although they did show a very interesting documentary on the South Pacific narrated by a man with a British accent, and I found a sort-of hip hop station on the satellite radio. There was quite a bit of turbulence, so we couldn't get out of our seats for most of the flight, and then my ears were in agony during the descent. However, we landed safely in San Diego without crashing at all, in no small part thanks to Jinx the No-Crash Dinosaur, I'm sure. (There is not a scanner here at the hotel, but maybe when I get back to work, I can scan Jinx and post him on this blog.) We got off the plane and immediately saw palm trees, beautiful beautiful palm trees. I hugged one and said to Tiffy, "Look! I'm a tree hugger!" Then we found the shuttle to our hotel.

Tiffy and I were the first ones in the shuttle, so we asked the driver if we should sit in the back seats, but he said no, since we were prompt, we could make the others sit in back. Then a foreign woman in a fuzzy red jacket sat shotgun, and an elderly couple arrived so we had to move back anyway. The lady turned to me and said, "Thank you girls for moving," but for one surreal moment I thought she said, "I saw you in the movie." THAT would have been bizarre! Sure, I was wearing my Famous Hat, but that's kind of a joke. How many people have actually watched my videos on YouTube?

The foreign woman in the fuzzy red jacket was, oddly enough, from Georgia. Yes, that Georgia, halfway around the world. (See my previous post.) She was here on business, but her company had only reserved the room and not paid for it, and she didn't have a credit card with her. (For some reason she thought Georgian credit cards would not work in the US.) She asked if she could pay cash for her first night, but they said no, she had to get them a credit card number. Of course it was like four in the morning in Georgia, so I'm not sure how exactly they expected her to do this. I was on the verge of letting her crash in our room, and Tiffy was on the verge of paying for her room herself, but we felt a little weird to be so forward with a stranger, so we just wished her good luck. Hey, I just saw her walking through the parking lot, so everything must have worked out for her. How funny that she walked by as I was writing about her!

This morning I couldn't stand it any longer and got out of bed at 6:30, since that's 8:30 in my world. (I will adjust soon enough.) It is a cool, rainy morning here in San Diego, and I walked around a little and found a convenience store that sells aloe cream and sun screen, since you can't bring more than 3 ounces of liquid on the plane. As far as I know, Tiffy is still asleep. And now I will play ePlush, since nobody is waiting for the computer.

Famous Hat