Wonderful Weekend
It was a marvelous weekend, but I worked my tail off.
Friday night I baked and baked and baked.
Saturday morning I got up and baked some more.
Then, I met my mom at the mall. She drove up to Madison from Chicagoland to visit me for my birthday (yeah, 2 weeks late, but that's okay). I usually hate the mall this time of year. Slow walking folk who appear to have no eyes and no idea where they are going somehow find their way to the mall. Like cattle, they appear to have no direction but that of the cow to their right, left, and front. However, the sales clerks were almost universally eager to please. I must admit, this is highly unusual for this area. Most of the time they act all put-out and your mere presence. So, that part was at least more pleasant than usual.
However, I did run into some rank incompetents when I ventured to the food court to buy 2 medium cokes. For some unknown reason we had to pre-order. By this I mean I was next in line, but a young girl had to come around from behind the counter and write my order on a laminated card with was pencil. She handed it to me. Four seconds later I handed it to the order-taker. She said, "So...what did you want?" Whereupon I repeated my order. Then I paid and moved to the left until my order was ready. And waited. And waited. Getting peevish. Once three people with food orders had moved past me, I not-so-subtly made eye-contact with the guy who appeared to be in charge. He quickly remedied the situation, but seemed aggravated that he had to attend to my order. Me and you both, buddy. However, after he handed me the beverages I learned that he had had the last laugh. You see, he had stopped filling the cups 1 inch from the top. That's one way to increase the profit margin. Sell an over-priced beverage and fail to fill the cup completely. Nice! At which point I decided that it just wasn't worth it to fight the matter. I mean, I'd already waited over ten minutes. How much longer might a full cup take? So, I walked away. But I know the universe will catch up with him.
And I will laugh.
Finally we were ready to depart for the second-worst location to visit this time of year: the grocery store. However, we never made it. This is largely due to the fact that my mom lost her car in the parking lot and we had to spend 30 minutes driving around to locate it. Yeesh!
So we went home and I got to open my birthday presents. Then, we went out to dinner and came back home to open Christmas presents. Why the dual holiday? Well, this is the year we travel to Prince Charming's parent's house for Christmas to have the brouhaha in the school gym. There are so many of them that no one house is large enough to accomodate all, so they go to the school gym. Cozy, no? Yeah, that's sarcasm. I don't find hard basketball floor festive. I also don't find the smells of sweaty teenager and unclean socks festive. But then, I've been told I'm too uppity in this way. So, yeah, Christmas will undoubtedly be a festival of kids screaming when they fall down in their fancy dress shoes on the slick gym floor, mothers screaming when said fall produces a damaged article of clothing, another casualty of the kid kind, or a broken toy in tow. This will quickly lead to the rapid departure of the dads who will exodus to the nearest watering hole, of which there are several in town.
The day after Christmas, Boxing Day, we fly out of O'hare to sunnier climes...namely Amarillo, TX via Dallas/Ft. Worth. However, if Prince Charming's luck holds, our arrival will harbinger a two-foot snow in the High Plains. Which will make Daddy happy at least, but might make the sun hard to come by. We are staying about a week. Which will give me plenty of time to wind down from Christmas-by-tetherball.
I totally crack myself up sometimes.
Well, why stop now? Might as well continue the ramble.
I finished my holiday baking. UPS is already hard at work delivery the fresh-baked holiday goodness. Now I can relax. Do yoga and spend my afternoons on the treadmill. And nap. Haven't been getting enough sleep lately. Saturday night I had the weirdest dream.
For some reason I was at an apartment building. Behind the building there was this big field of natural prairie grasses. We were outside getting ready to leave when two planes crashed into this field within 10 minutes of each other. The first plane came down kinda softly, like an emergency landing. It was a 747 passenger airliner, so we all ran toward the plane to see about survivors. For some reason I was told to go call 911. As I was talking to the operator, the second plane came down. This was just a little 4-seater though, and it came down in a fiery ball. It landed about a 1/2 mile away from the first crash site. I finished up with the operator by instructing her to send every available bus to the scene, then took an incoming call on my cell phone from my boss, Special Agent Gibbs (Mark Harmon). He told me to saddle-up, he had to call me in, and that DiNozzo was en route to pick me up. DiNozzo took me to the train that we act as our headquarters for the duration of the mission. I would be sharing a berth with Kate Todd. Abby and McGee were there, but I only saw them when I got to the briefing room.
We were on board to foil a terrorist plot. Gibbs paired me with DiNozzo and we started doing interviews and such. Later that night, Kate & McGee were on watch, so I went to take a shower. I still had plane crash sweat on me afterall. Coming out of the shower, two men burst into my room, seemingly by accident, and catch me in a towel. One of the men speaks with a middle eastern accent. The other does not speak at all at first. The first man appears to be in charge, but he quickly defers to the second man's suggestion that I lose the towel. I don't know what the second man has said, but the first man quickly makes it plain what I should do. I flatly refuse. Whereupon the second man says in perfect English, "You'll damn well do it!" and pulls out a gun. So, I flash them and tell them to "get the hell out!" They leave and I call DiNozza on his cell phone, but I only get a busy signal. I'm a little unhinged, but less by baring myself to strangers than the gut feeling that these are the bad guys we've been looking for. I can't reach anybody, so I quickly get dressed and head toward the berth given over to briefing. Gibbs is there, but nobody else is. He informs me that an armed gang has taken over the front of the train, including the three communal cars. I fill Gibbs in on my suspicions about my armed perverts. We begin to formulate a plan.
That's when I woke up.
Labels: Birthday
