The past weekend was a total mixed bag. It got off to a very bad start, involving rain, missed flights, delayed flights, and missing the show I was going to see. Missed it, as in, the show was ending at the exact time I was de-planing. Sigh.
Last week was a weird week, and included a bunch of blood work that I’m still waiting for the results. A few things in some routine blood work I had about 3 weeks ago made the doctor want to re-test and add a few additional tests. Stuff that I don’t want to get into in case it’s nothing – right now it’s just at the screening point. Anyway, just dealing with those was enough to stress me out a lot and I decided that I needed to get away. Just run away from reality and lose myself in a vacation for a weekend. To emphasize how last-minute the decision was – I bought the plane tickets Wednesday afternoon for a flight that left 48 hours later. Luckily I got a damn good package deal – a flight AND rental car for about $600+ less than the flight alone would’ve cost had I purchased directly from the airline.
There was a show going on at a comedy club on Friday night that I wanted to see. I figured the best way to keep my mind off things that were stressing me out was to laugh my ass off. The friend who I was going to be staying with in LA was also going to the show – so it all worked out. She & another friend had plans to go to Hotel Cafe after the sketch show, and I was going to tag along. Saturday night she had another concert to attend – I wasn’t sure if I was going to go or not, I just wanted to be in LA and far away from stress here.
Then, as I said at the beginning, Friday got here and it was a horrible day. I still want to kill people for Friday, too. Starting with the idiot who made me leave work late… then on to the eejits who closed off North parking, then to the asswipe shuttle driver at South parking who drove right past me when I was waiting to be picked up… and on to the other jackass shuttle driver who decided to move as slow as molasses and add an extra passenger… and culminating with the total bitch of a ticket agent who wouldn’t let me on my plane. I made it there like, 5 minutes after the cutoff, because of those idiots. And my damn plane was delayed!! So it wasn’t even getting ready to leave – I had plenty of time to make it to the gate, and I easily could’ve checked my baggage at the plane. But nooooooo. That flight was supposed to leave at 3:20. It left after 4:30. I could’ve fucking made it – esp since the airport was closed for a while due to lightning.
The flight she put me on standby for was already overbooked – so I had no chance at all on the standby list of making the flight. The flight I ended up on kept getting pushed back and back and further back. And it ended up taking off way too late for me to make it there. And it was the earliest flight – the others I could’ve gotten on all left later, and they were all delayed way late too, since they were unwinding the back up of planes. Sighs. Once my plane FINALLY took off and got in the air – they announced that there was a bad storm cell to the west of us, so instead of flying out west, like normal, they were going to fly DUE SOUTH first, to get around the storm!!! Which added an additional 45 minutes to my flight. (If it hadn’t been for that, I might have been able to catch the last half of the show and still got a good laugh. Grrrrr.)
In addition to those problems, that flight went to a different airport. And they wouldn’t let me transfer my car reservation that had been part of the package. And instead of using the reservations my ma had nicely made for me while I was stranded at the airport (which yes, the guy at the car place knew about) … he created a third reservations and put me in a car size I repeatedly said I DID NOT want. So I got fucking overcharged by a whole damn lot.
And to top it off, since the ticket agent had put me on a flight to LAX – that is where my luggage went, even though I ended up going to Burbank. Since I missed the show I was wanting to see, I decided to skip the concert at Hotel Cafe, and drive all the way down to LAX instead to pick up my suitcase. The one thing that amused me – the first song to come on the radio when I got in the rental car? Daniel Powter’s “Bad Day”. Yeah. I definitely had one of those.
So, like I said – Friday was baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaad. But the rest of the weekend was okay. Saturday we had lots of fun doing not much of anything. And I acquired the new nickname “Tittie McGee.” Or was it “Tits McGee”? Either way, you get the idea. haha. And Sunday all my flights were on time and things went smoothly there.
I will admit, though, there was one good thing about Friday. While I was waiting on my flight to Burbank, I saw a someone walk by that looked familiar. The second time she walked by, I decided to chance it, and call out a name. If it was her, she’d stop – if not, she’d hopefully just keep walking by and ignore me. I was right in my guess – it was indeed my friend Tanya who I hadn’t seen in roughly 8-9 years. As luck would have it – she was on the same flight to Burbank that I was. She decided to join me where I was sitting, and we spent the next few hours catching up while we waited on the plane. So that was nice, getting to run into an old friend like that.
And even though almost all of my problems and delays on Friday were out of my control – there’s still part of me that’s kicking myself. I just had to decide to be “responsible” and work almost a full day. If I had just taken the entire day off, like I really wanted to, I would have been in California long before the storms ever hit here in Dallas. There were a ton of early flights, but I chose to take the latest one I could, so I wouldn’t miss too much work. Some times being responsible really fucking sucks.
