4 January 2003: Home

Whence I am never leaving again. I entered my house this evening at 5:00 MST, 11.5 hours after leaving my mother-in-law's house this morning.

We left at 8:30 to return the rental car (a bargain: get one from a dealership rather than from a rental agency) and by 9:30, my mother-in-law dropped us off at the Lauderdale airport (I say "Lauderdale" the way people from my neck of the woods say "Saybrook" instead of "Old Saybrook." I am not from that neck of the woods. Sorry.)

The airport was a clusterfuck. Spirit Airlines: Cheap in dollars, costly in time, honesty, and butt tuckeredness and collapsed lumbarity (a word I just made up). Our 11:45 flight's wheels left the tarmac at 1:45. When we landed at 3:45 MST, four hours later, it was on only one wheel. Then thump, the left wheel, and thimp, the front wheel.

We sat in Row 26 of an MD-80, with two by three seating. Possibly they try to shove the loud or annoying things, like parrots and children, in the back of the plane. But kids were everywhere and the woman with the cat got to sit toward the front. In Row 25 were two parents and three children (one puked before take-off). Across the aisle from us were two boys and a parent (the other parent sat nearby and they spelled each other. Behind us were another three children and two parents. I hated each and every one of them for the duration of the flight, but as we taxied on the ground (popelike, I would have kissed the tarmac) the puker (no longer puking) and I had a bit of chat--she announced numerous times and mysteriously, "I ate all the potatoes"--and at the baggage carousel the boys across the aisle and I speculated on whether the luggage had adventures like in the end of "Toy Story 2."

But I gladly would have throttled any of them during the flight.

The closer we got to home, the more the traffic signals seemed to turn red just to frustrate me.

So complacent had Blake waxed that when I set him, all covered up, on the porch column, to return to the curb for the luggage, he didn't scream. I unlocked the doors, set Blake's travel cage on the dining table, and popped the emergency door, and he clambered out, looked around the dining room, and said, "Wheet wheet!"

I couldn't've said it better myself.

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This evening RDC set up my Yule present. Lo, the webcam returneth. Was my nose always this big?

The camera is much sharper than the old one. Also I am at the dining table instead of in my study. Also I have new glasses. But it's the same hoodie dress and fleece as before, and the same cockatiel-as-goiter.

We timed the return well. RDC called for a pizza delivery as soon as we got on the highway. I was either drenching my thirsty plants or thawing chow for my starving buddy when the bell rang.

Now laundry is washing and drying, suitcases are empty, there is a webcam, RDC is wearing one of my gifts to him--a scrumptiously thick, ankle-length navy blue terry bathrobe--and I am reading a mess of email and snailmail. I have to devise a way to display holiday cards that doesn't take up the whole mantel--already occupied by Rudolph and Max wearing an antler and my Little Drummer Boy sled--and that doesn't require tacks in the wall, as I used to do.