narcissistic ramblings of my night life

In spite of everything, I do like myself. But you knew that already since there nothing quite as narcissistic as having a blog. But other than the whole narcissism thing, I'm just very entertaining to have around, you see. Don't think this comes easily - Oh ho. It is very challenging to keep up with all my high-maintenance traits and general weirdness. I'd like to invite you to take a brief trip into my life now. If that totally creeps you out, then you get the option of rolling your eyes and surfing on over to some other website or going to eat some cheerios. I *have* to go through this #(@*#&$ all the time.

DH called me from Augusta yesterday afternoon around 3:00pm to tell me his flight had been delayed. It was now scheduled to leave Atlanta at 1am and arrive in here at 3am. "OK." I said. "When I roll over and grunt, that means I'm telling you hello and I missed you and all that stuff."

Then I proceeded to have a nice afternoon, taking the kids to see the men's gymnastics team at the college, eating barbeque for dinner, having relative ease getting the small children to finish up their homework and go to bed. (I said *relative* ease.)

I enjoyed the quiet house for a little bit by watching some inane TV shows, clicking through CNN and other news channels and generally wondering why I didn't just go to bed. I finally dragged myself off for sleep, after moving the two not-so-small children off of my bed and into their own. I settled down around 11:30, and woke up around 1:30. I mention this brief interlude of sleep because, well, it's the ONLY sleep I ended up getting. Except for maybe 30 more minutes, but that's later in the story.
Since I was awake, I plodded on down here to the office to pull up the Air Tran web site to check on John's flight and make sure it was actually going to take off. Lo and behold, its departure time had moved way up, closer to the originally scheduled time. "Yay!" I thought. It, in fact, showed that it landed at 1:00 am. Since the airport is about 30 minutes away at it was 1:30, I decided I'd just wait up for my wonderful husband.

After surfing the net for a while, and plodding back and forth to the window to see if I could see him drive up, I thought to myself, “Hmmm. Seems like I’ve been doing this a while.” So I checked the clock. Again. And Again. Around 2:30, I felt a little twinge of worry and gave him a call to see if he'd lost his luggage or something. Here is the key. His phone was turned OFF. Now people, tell me...why do we buy cell phones? Communication. Cah-moon-i-cay-shion. We use them to talk to each other. Especially when we are away on trips. And to do that, we must TURN THEM ON. Since it was not on, I left a cute little message - "Hey honey, just wondering where you are. Sure do wish you had your phone turned on. Hope everything is OK. Give me a call!"

I went back to the computer to make SURE the airplane had landed at 1 am. I thought to myself, "1:00 sounds awfully rounded. Sounds like more like an estimate. Let me check around." Sure enough, I found a place on the airport website where it shows the arrival and departure times. Ah-HA. His flight landed at 12:50! Not 1:00. Wait. That's even worse. So I waited and I waited. At 3:00, I was mildly freaking out so I of course envisioned him lying tangled in the middle of a horrible car accident (I figured I could no longer worry about airplane crashes since the website listed it as “Landed”. Surely they’d use a more descriptive word if it’d crashed. Like hard. “Landed real hard.”) I surfed on over to the depart of transportation website to check if I could find something to list car accidents. Oooh – luck! I found a nice map with a big red "I" on the interstate right around the airport. Heart.Skips.Beat. Click. Click. (clicking on the red “I” does nothing. I want pictures! I want description!). I frantically surfed some more and figured out that the red I belonged way over across the river, not on the interstate. Well that’s a relief. But now I'm worried because I don’t know what to worry about. So I did what any insane person would do, and I called the department of transportation. I should add here that I have a cold and my voice is starting to sound like Brenda Vaccaro, which might sound sexy if I wasn't trying to shout "ROAD CONDITIONS" into the voice-recognition program that they use. It didn't understand me. Horrors of horrors, that meant I had to talk to a real person.
DOT:"How may I help you?"
Me: "Um...I wanted to check on road conditions. I guess your software couldn't
understand me."
DOT: Silence.
Me: "Um, what's going on on the interstate? Any incidents worthy of a big red I? Heh heh."
DOT "There are currently no advisories posted anywhere in the state."
Me: (realizing I wasn't going to get far with this tact.) OK. Bye.

Well that was unhelpful. So I called DH's cell phone again, which was still turned off. I recorded a oh, *slightly* more frantic message this time, and louder, hoping maybe he'd hear me through the turned-off phone. I wondered if I called his cell phone enough times if it would magically turn itself on.

3:30. 'Kay. I checked and RE-checked the flight arrival time. I pulled my pillows and a blanket down to the couch to sleep. I heard a car door, and relief swept over me, only to disappear again when I figured out it was the neighbor. Damned teenagers. What are they doing getting home after 3:30?!! I lay there awake and had visions of DH somewhere in Atlanta snoring away, and got mightily pissed off. What if he changed his flight until morning? What if he hadn’t realized they had moved the departure time back up and he missed his flight? Again - CELL PHONE. Surely he'd call. Wouldn't he?

I hopped up and called Air Tran.
Me:" My husband was supposed to be flying home on flight xxx tonight from Atlanta. Is there any way you can tell me if he was on that flight?"
Air Tran:" One minute."
I could hear heavy breathing. For a loooong time. Finally,
Air Tran: "Can I help you?"
I took a deep breath “I thought that’s what you were doing!?”
(silence)
So I repeated my question.
Air Tran: "Uh, that flight is supposed to land at 1 am."
Me: "Yeah, that's more than 2 hours ago, so I'm getting worried."
Air Tran:" Well honey, that's just an estimate. He's probably still flying."
Me: "That was TWO HOURS AGO. I just want to know if he was on the flight."
Air Tran:"Well I can’t give you that information unless you have some critical identifying information and he listed you as the contact person.”
Critical identification stuff I could handle. But I’m 99.9% sure DH didn’t think to put me down as a contact person. I never put anyone down.
We went through the process, just to see.
Air Tran:”Oh, hmm…. One minute please.”
Me: “OK”. Visions of a crashed airplane. What do they tell you if that happens?
Air Tran:”OK ma’am? Oh – wait, one minute please.”
Me: “OK” (sniffling a little to play up the worried wife bit. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE tell me what’s going on!!!!)
Air Tran:”Ma’am, that flight was diverted to another airport and they were put on a bus back to your area.”
Me:”Really? YAY!!!!!”
Air Tran: (stunned silence).

So I called DH’s cell (still off) to let him know I was no longer totally freaking out.

Around 4:15, the phone rang.
John:”Hi honey, I’m at the airport.”
Me:”Yeah. You were bussed in. I guess you heard my three messages?”
John:”Well, two of them so far.”
Me:”I’m glad you’re OK. But your cell phone was OFF!!! I’ve had no sleep! I’ve been awake since 1:30 worried that your plane had gone down or you were mangled in a car crash.”
John:”Oh honey, I love you.”

He finally made it home around 5 am. And thus ends my saga, other than the ensuing problems I had with John making popping noises in his sleep, the cat licking himself, then jumping into the bag of dogfood we have while we dogsit Corrie, etc., etc., etc.

But all is well now. Other than the fact that the Airport and Air Tran still list that flight as having landed at Newport News. What I discovered later is that if you click on the flight number, it shows it as taking off about 1 minute after it landed and flying to the neighboring airport. Which, DH tells me, is fairly accurate, although the wheels never actually touched the ground.

But I'm not mad about the cell phone anymore. Much.