Excercise in Futility

I did not go to the museum today because of the blizzard conditions, not to mention the small snow drift outside my door. This made me a little whiny and cranky, but I still had stuff to do. I agreed to go and meet my friend Angie at Midway today. There had been some delays and stuff at the airport, but by mid afternoon some flights were still getting in, and when I checked the Southwest website, her flight was in the air and early. It seemed crazy, but who knows?

I get all bundled up, and I go out. Walking in tall powdery drifting snow takes a lot of effort, and it is best to go at it fast and furious to keep your momentum built up. So I sort of power through three and a half blocks to get to the train, and I arrive soaked. I take the brown line all the way into downtown, and then switch to the orange line which I take to its endpoint at Midway. The whole trip is an hour and fifteen minutes, and I should be hitting baggage claim at the same time as Angie. However, the level above baggage claim, I check the monitors for information about her flight, and somehow in the last 85 minutes her flight went from being twenty minutes early to an hour and twenty-five minutes late. Great.

Down I go to baggage claim--which is crowded with all sorts of people--and I pull up a seat (because I thank goodness find one) and read my book. Her arrival times pass, and I am still curled up with Scandalmonger by William Saffire which is cool because I really need to finish it before it goes back to the library, and it is super long for how little I read now that I no longer ride the train to work. Then Angie calls me--from Nashville. She is stranded there with no idea what she is supposed to do since she no longer has a boarding pass (they took it when she boarded). They got rerouted there when they couldn't land at Midway. So, I turn around and take the long two train trip back to my apartment as well as the hard working hopping it takes to get home since more snow had accumulated in the two hours that my airport adventure consumed. I can't wait to walk to work tomorrow since no one here bothers to scrape their sidewalks (however the walking and the horrendous driving conditions did make me very happy that I didn't try to go to the stupid museum).

Angie did call me just a few minutes ago saying that she got on a plane in Nashville that should, maybe, get here tonight. She was waiting to take off.