Tomorrow my husband is flying out to India. Again. It’s going to feel like Groundhog Day in the Bill Murray movie of the same name. You know, the one in which “Phil” keeps waking up to the same day, over and over again, and his lousy day keeps repeating in excruciating detail?
It will feel like Groundhog Day, because this morning, already, my husband was supposed to be flying to India. Except he didn’t make it off the ground, so we are going to have to repeat the process tomorrow, and go into a holding pattern at the airport, checking and reconfirming and circling about like a vulture trying to swoop onto any leftover seats. At the rate things are going, my husband, who previously had me carefully select his seats so that they were conveniently located in the aisle or in the bulkhead, is now willing to take any seat available, including one that might have a hole in it.
If I had any sense, I wouldn’t be telling you any of this, because Warrenton is getting to be a little dangerous, and I’m sure all the criminal types are reading this paper. Except for you, of course. Husband-less, I present a vulnerable image, I guess, even though half of my kids are taller than I am. Plus, we have that fierce watchdog from the shelter named Betty Lou. (Doesn’t her name convey the ferocious Southern belle that she is? This dog could lick you to death.)
I have to tell you this because I need to blame someone for this lost flying day. Of course, we shouldn’t pick on United Airlines who canceled the flight from Dulles to O’Hare without mentioning a word to us. That would be too obvious. The airlines claimed they had no way to contact us and tell us the airplane had mechanical problems. Couldn’t contact us? Could not contact us? I’ll bet if we owed them ten cents, they would have figured out how to contact our grandparents, our children’s teachers, and us. Then, they would have flown a plane over to come collect the dime.
I know it was really my fault; I should have checked the flight status before leaving for the airport. Instead, we called and checked en route, and learned just as we merged onto I-66 that the flight was cancelled and he was booked on the same flight, one day later. What about today’s flight to India? “No problem,” the agent said as she booked him on a flight out of DC. We drove directly to the Reagan National Airport so my husband could catch a different connecting flight. We got there, but there was more confusion and no flight.
When that failed, they tried yet another connecting flight which also failed. About the time someone piped up the bright idea that he drive to Dulles to try to get an an even later and riskier flight, he called me. I turned around to go bring him back from the Reagan Airport.
I know I’m probably at fault, but finding someone else to blame is ever so much more satisfying. Who didn’t pray enough before the flight? Nothing seemed to go right today. Do you ever have those days? No fair lumping every Monday into that category.
This morning my husband awoke early as usual, but when his time in the bathtub turned into an unplanned polar plunge, he made official what the rest of us had vaguely suspected yesterday: there was no hot water in the house. We had all blamed someone or something else for our tepid showers. But this morning he made it official: there was no hot water, and there was no other soul or device hogging it all. So we were crouched down together in the basement. Our romantic ambience was provided by the pilot light that he had just taught me to light on the hot water heater.
Then, just so I wouldn’t be completely stranded, he went over the finer points of our home computer network. I’m not going to tell you how many computers we have, not because I’m afraid you’ll think less of me if I have more than you do, but because I don’t know unless I stop to count. And certainly, you don’t expect me to stop writing and check up on the facts, do you?
My husband has our house computer-networked in a way that would put many a small business to shame. We found a glitch this morning that would have converted our printer/scanner into a gigantic table decoration for the next couple of weeks, had he not worked to troubleshoot the problem and fix it.
Without our printer for two weeks, we would have been in a bind. And without hot water, we would have been in hot water. I needed a reminder how much I depend on this man, even though I admit this grudgingly.
We just confirmed that he has a seat on tomorrow’s flights, and the seat doesn’t have a hole in it. Let’s hope that the plans don’t either.
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