wheeee! Post holiday airline fun.

Now I know why we drive the 7.5 hours to my hometown on most holidays.

I had the day from hell yesterday. Mark and I got to the airport at about noon. Our flight was set to leave at 6, but there were two flights beforehand and 'standby' looked great on both of them.

Okay, cool. We got to the airport, ate lunch and went to the gate. The gate folks thought we could make it on standby as well so I bought a book and Mark and I settled in and read. Uninterrupted reading time is always a good thing, but I discovered that it gets old...fast!

The flight time comes and darn it they only had one seat.. . Okay, the NEXT flight was at 4, only 80 mins away. Settle settle, read, read. Then an announcer comes on. The flight is delayed out of Chicago because of 'weather'. It arrives at 5:30 and YAY we're on it. We happily troop onto the plane.

And sit. And wait. And wait some more. This 'weather' includes high winds and thunderstorms. We can't take off and fly right into the weather so we're being held on the tarmac. FOR TWO HOURS! It was a small reigonal jet and I'm pretty claustrophobic. So...where was I seated? The row with the bulkhead in front of me. I was SO glad that I have an engrossing submission to take my mind off my racing heart and quickened breath.

Our 4:20 PM flight finally took off at just shy of 7:30. We were on the plane for two hours waiting, waiting, waiting some more. Thankfully, everybody was calm and in good spirits. I read subs on my PDA until the battery got weak and then turned back to my paperback.

We land. YAY. We wait for a spot at the gate. UGGGH. We walked off the plane at just after NINE, central, 10 eastern! I've read over half a book and most of a plus novel length submission in that time! Of course me being....me, I was reading a book about a plane crash LOL!

But I'm here...

Fortunately, the vet let us pick up Moonlight at that late hour. Moonlight, you ask. Who is Moonlight? Welll... we got a kitten. She's a sweetheart and has really enriched our time here. Anyway, Moonlight was spayed while we were away and this poor tiny kitty has an Elizabethan collar on her that is as big as...oh maybe half her body size. This is so she won't bite or chew the stitches. Poor darling staggers when she walks because the collar is darned uncomfy. I'll try to post some pictures later tonight.

Thanksgiving was...interesting ;)

We flew home from Chicago for Thanksgiving. No problems...the flights went really well.

Since none of us are big fans of turkey, Mark offered to make a roast lamb. We all loved that idea, so he went off to the grocery store yesterday to buy lamb and all the fixins. He started cooking it and I settled down to watch some tv. It has been very windy outside, but that was okay...I wasn't going out.

Two thirds of the way into the lamb cooking, disaster struck in the form of a power outage. We just had to shake our heads and laugh about the whole situation. The lamb smelled SOOOOO good and yet...it was soooo close and yet so far away from being eaten since we have an electric stove. What were we to do? Should we find an IHOP? Should we hope for the best and wait it out? As visions of lamb dinner danced in our heads, we prepared ourselves for pancakes or french toast at the local IHOP.

After about a half hour, Mark called the power company and they said the electricty would be back on within two, two and a half hours. We had no idea what we should do about the lamb, but for the moment we relaxed by flashlight and read ebooks.

Fortunately, the electricty was only off for about an hour and Mr. Lamby was devoured.

I hope your Thanksgiving was much more routine :)

The money pit

Well, my last post was a long while ago...and boy do I have some news to report!

My husband and I have been in Chicago for just three weeks now, He loves his new job and the company. The area is different but not bad at all. The food has been fabulous, the shopping better than average but...there's one BIG fly in the ointment.

Ever feel like Scar from the Lion King when he says "I'm surrounded by idiots!"? My husband and I have been saying that a LOT.

His company arranged lodging for us in a corporate housing complex. It looked great...on paper.

A few days before we began our 12-hr drive out here, we got a package from them ioncluding apt keys, the phone number and door code (They have secured entry here). Never did they mention the Internet which my husband and I thought was weird since the website discusses high speed Internet, so Mark gave them a call. We both needed Internet, me for work and him to finish his freelance project. They assured us that yes, all we needed were our laptops and we'd be online. 100% connectivity yadda yadda.

We got here and entered the place. Its small but okay. Then the barking started. Two of our neighbors have dogs that don't get along. At all. All day and most of the night these two are barking, growling and howling. Ugggh. Okay, you can't choose your neighbors;that's just one of those things. As is the abovestairs neighbor who plays his music LOUDLY without any indication or consideration of the hour. Again, just one of those things.

We had a look around for the laundry and couldn't find it. Hmmm...strange. We decided we'd follow up about that later. The Internet was working, by this point we'd gone out and gotten some food staples and we just wanted to relax.

After a couple of hours, the Internet went down. Ehh, things happen. We relaxed and I taped a couple of tv shows on the provided VCR.. When the shows were done taping, I rewound the tape. Hmm, what was that grinding sound? We soon found out when the tape shot out, its entrails spilling out after it. RIP dear tape, we hardly used you. Again, just one of those things.

The next day, we barely had any Internet. We tried to call the management office, only to learn that they didn't open until 4 (YES FOUR) in the afternoon. Okkkay. When we finally got someone to answer us, they said the Internet would surely be back soon and they'd checked and everything was fine.


The shower is terrible...the pressure is so strong that you feel pummeled instead of clean. The fridge makes death-throe sounds--every time it runs, it sounds like it is laboring. The microwave was filthy when we got here (EWWW) and the oven works, but has burned everything we've tried to cook, even if we shave five or ten minutes off the cook time. The toaster causes the smoke detector to go off. The shower leaks so that the bathroom floor is constantly wet and the spare blanket they offered? It had some...suspicious stains on it...I repeat...EWWWW!

But these aren't even the worst things. Five things happened that have made us just shake our heads and laugh.

The Internet. It went up and down (mostly down) the first week. At the beginning of the second week, we started haunting the office, which assured us every time that there was NOTHING WRONG. What-ever! Finally, they agreed to send a tech from the cable Internet company out. Lo and behold, we'd been inadvertently STEALING someone else's Internet. These idiots in the front office hadn't even bothered to set us up with an account, knowing someone else had internet connectivity in the building. We were not amused. IDIOTS!

Laundry. At the end of the first week, we need to do laundry. Our apartment didn't have a laundry room, so Mark went exploring and fortunately one of the other buildings had a door propped open. He found the machines in that building but realized that they used scanned cards instead of coins. Okkay. We were SOOL, and ended up at a laundromat with some very...interesting people.

Two days later, Mark managed to get hold of a woman at the office, who brought by one of these cards, but...NO KEY. Yeah, we could do laundry, but we couldn't enter that darn building. Oy!

Postal mail. On the mailboxes inside the building it clearly states to put your name on the box or you won't get mail. We did that...and STILL didn't get mail. Turns out it had to be placed just so inside not ON the box and the post office hadn't delivered any packages as a result. Thankfully, they held these packages for us at the nearby post office.

The damn VCR eats tapes. We tried two tapes in addition to the first one and yep, it munched them. When the girl came by to give us the laundry card, I told her about it and all she could say is that she never heard of that and we could buy our own VCR if we wanted to tape shows. Um...why should we buy something that they provided, just because theirs is broken?

The crowning problem happened this last wekend. Mark turned on the range hood fan and BOOM! An explosion complete with sparks shocked us. He called the emergency hotline after we determined that nothing was actually ON fire and they told him it wasn't an emergency and that they'd send someone over today (Monday). This morning the management office called Mark to let him know that this is the *homeowner's* responsibility and not theirs. The attitude was that he was being outrageous and bothering him...I gather until he pointed out that this is *corporate* housing and that THEY are the owners. Its nearly 3 Pm and nobody has called or arrived to check it out.

Uggh... Its actually laughable at this point in time but sheesh! What ELSE can go wrong with this place.