Les Bonnes Choses

...and hopefully not a continuation of yesterday. I am sitting in the lobby of the Orrington hotel in lovely Evanston listening to some classic rock station over the musak. Let me run down how I came to be here.

Yesterday I made a detour to the school to pick up my book to read on the plane, and dump off some old electronics in the electronics recycling bin. I felt like I was in a bit of a hurry because we were on our way to Rebecca's parents' house for lunch, so I made a short cut across the muddy hill up the backside of the social science building because, for no good reason that I can tell, my 1D key does not work on the service entrance door, but does work on the main entrance door (despite the fact that, if you can get in the main entrance, you can easily get to the service entrance from inside the building). As it turned out, it was a poor choice of shortcut given the terrain, and I stepped out of my shoe and into the wet muddy ground when the turf refused to let it go.

Later on in the day I was dropped off at the airport to find that my flight from Detroit to Chicago had been canceled. I would be spending the dinner hour (and a few hours past that) in the airport, rather than enjoying a proper meal with Amy. It was in the airport that I learned the hard way that the currency exchangers there are the LASTpeople you want to do business (in addition to having a rate 5% lower than the bank rate, they also charged me a $2.50 commission). And once my later flight was finally boarded, we were about another half hour late taking off as the airline tried to fit on all the passengers whose flights had been canceled. The last standby passengers sat beside me. They had been flying all day from Mexico -- with two kids young enough to have pacifiers who were very, very overtired.

The plane landed properly on the runway, and Amy was there to pick me up and deliver me to the hotel, so that part went right. However once I got up to my room, I found that the promised internet connection was not working, and so I was unable to check my email to find my itinerary. On the upside, as I lay awake all night long with a case of the Mirandas, I had a chance to figure out what it might be that keeps me from sleeping.

So that brings me to here, the hotel lobby, the only place I can access the internet, and where I will hopefully be met by Jen and Fan before too long.