I'm home

Boy, it feels good to be home, but I came home to bad news. My Conure (parrot) died while I was gone. I think he ran out of food and nobody thought to check on him while I was gone. I had him for 8 years. A student gave him to me my first year at my high school because she no longer wanted him. He was a very good doorbell and watch-bird and always let me know when someone came to the door. The kids feel really bad that they didn't realize he was out of food and I should have remembered to remind them, but things were pretty busy. We will bury him in the backyard this afternoon.

The flights home were of course filled with adventure too. Eventhough I drove from the college to the airport every day of the trip, I got lost yesterday and ended up visiting several towns on the way back to the airport when I really needed to be there on time. I managed to get there with plenty of time because there were no lines to check in, but the self check in said I had to have help because I was traveling with a small child and they had to move his seat for weight distribution on the plane. Now, really? 50 pounds is going to make the plane fly differently? Wow, that is scary! I didn't check any bags this time because I wanted to just get out of there when I got home so I figured that would make things go quicker.

We had about 2 hours of waiting time for the plane and decided to have a snack of ice cream. I had given all of my cash to my daughter and had $6 left. I didn't realize that the snack places only took cash and luckily the ice cream only cost $5.99. The lady felt sorry for me and was going to help me pay for the ice cream when I couldn't find enough. Luckily I found another dollar in my pocket and we enjoyed our ice cream together.

Then, it was past time to board and the plane hadn't landed. I had about a 2 hour layover in Chicago so I wasn't too worried. When they made the announcement that the plane was having mechanical difficulties and that the mechanics were working on it, then I started thinking I might not get home. As people started lining up to get transferred to other flights, they decided they had fixed the problem and loaded us on the plane.

We sat on the runway for about 30 minutes (already an hour late for takeoff) and finally black smoke starts coming out of the left engine. I'm thinking this isn't a good sign. Finally the pilot comes on and says that they were having troubles starting the left engine, but luckily they have all these safety features built into the plane and they used their secondary ignition and got the engine started. Oh, great! I feel safer already!

We finally take off and have to circle Cleveland for 20 minutes until they can get us into a flight pattern that won't crash into other planes for landing and finally make it into Chicago aobut 30 minutes before my next flight. The whole flight, Michael is reading the safety manual. He wants to go down the inflatable slides and have the oxygen masks come out and is very disappointed that we don't crash.

We have to run from our plane to the furthest terminal and when we get there, I asked if we had enough time to go to the bathroom as the plane had already boarded. Luckily we did, but we didn't get time for dinner. We got on the plane and the pilot comes out and says they are re-programming the computer so we have to sit for another 20 minutes. They wouldn't let us off because they didn't want us to wander away.

Finally we are on our way. Michael played video games for the whole 4 hour flight and I tried to sleep. The lady next to me moved seats so I had some extra room. 2 minutes before we landed, Michael fell alseep and then didn't wake up until this morning. There were several nice people who helped me with my bags and getting him into the shuttle so we could get home.

Now, I hope my students will be nice today because I only got about 5 hours sleep.