Queen of Rambles

Once again I’ve waited till the last minute to meet my Nano goals. I’m at 48,888 so will submit the file for validation tonight (or should I say this morning?).

I had a little holiday crisis today even though we aren’t celebrating at all. I suppose that’s why I had the crisis. I decided at 3 this afternoon that I must have turkey even though I can’t have the gravy. I could make the stuffing without onions, I could make the potatoes without fat. It wouldn’t be fun, but it’s doable. I ended up at the turkey section of the grocery store (amazing that they even have one) with a four kilo frozen turkey in my hand. I carried it around for about ten minutes, trying to figure out how I was going to thaw it out and cook it within two hours. What can I say? I was desperate. Eventually sanity won and I bought a jar of pasta sauce and we had chicken breasts, whole grain pasta and tomato sauce for dinner. I’m living excitement, folks.

It’s just silly that I even care about Thanksgiving. I’ve had a total of two Thanksgivings at home since I graduated from college. When you run away from home it’s hard to get back for the holidays. First I was 2000 miles away, then I was 8 hours away and now I’m on the other side of the planet. At least I’ll get turkey and all the trimmings in January. Maybe, if I am feeling very ambitious, I’ll do something for Christmas. We’ll see I guess.

We are having problems with our travel plans. Our travel agent said there was no hurry to buy our tickets for January 1. He’s a foolish, foolish man. I was very surprised when I heard that we didn’t need to make official reservations right away and it looks like I was right. Now we have to fly on the dreaded Lufthansa airline. I hate them. Hate them. When Mike called and told me we were flying with them I started crying. Completely irrational, I know, but it just proves how badly I hate them. Their seats are much more cramped than the other airlines we’ve flown on, their service sucks and our experience last time was just generally horrible. First, we got stuck in a row of three seats right behind a row of four seats so the metal bars on the bottom weren’t lined up correctly and there was no leg room. That wasn’t helped by the fact that the overhead bins were all full (since we followed directions and boarded when they called our row, unlike everyone else) so we had to have our carryons on the floor by our feet. It was a miserable eleven hours. Then we were so far back that they ran out of the “good” (I’ll use that term loosely) meals by the time they got to us so we had to have the crappy-ass vegetarian stuff. I was starving. I told Mike the travel agent better arrange better seats for us this time, so maybe that will help.

I’ve been on some pretty bad flights in my day, but that one really took the cake. You’d think the flight that I puked on would be the worse, but it was nothing compared to those two horrible events.

When I was in college I flew back and forth for Christmas and summer. The Christmas of my sophomore year was tough. I was in the middle of a sophomore slump, which meant major depression. I hated my roommate. I hated my subject area, I hated my college. . . You get the idea. We got to the airport and I was the only passenger booked for the flight from Klamath Falls to San Francisco. Can you believe they still flew me down there? I guess they had to get the plane down there or they probably would have cancelled it. So off I went, after being specially instructed by the pilot about where to sit. The plane was one of those 12 seaters that didn’t even have a flight attendant.

So I was sitting there crying in peace when we hit turbulence. The pilots changed the course of the plane, but it didn’t help. At one point I looked out my window and I swear I could have touched Mt. Shasta if I could have opened the window. We were being flung around the skies and I was convinced we were going to crash and I was going to have to eat the pilots because we’d be stranded on a snow capped mountain.

Eventually the motion and the emotions got to be too much and I made use of my puke bag. Gross gross gross.

It should be noted that when I got back to school I changed my major from psychology to English Education–probably the worst decision I’ve ever made in my life. I guess I wouldn’t want to trade the path I’ve walked down since I wouldn’t want to jeopardize meeting Mike and all that lovey gushy stuff, but I am so glad I had the guts to get out of teaching even though it’s what I spent so much money and time training for.

Ok, I am going to go kick this Nano in the ass and then you guys can quit hearing about it every day.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 27th, 2003 at 11:37 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.