Let's go with the bad news first.
I put Mark on the shuttle to the airport at 8am this morning. We actually got to the gas station where it picks up at almost the same time as the shuttle, so there wasn't much waiting around. He called me at 10:40am to tell me that he was sitting at the gate, patiently waiting to board for his 12:20pm flight.
At around 4pm Pacific, he called me to tell me that his flight from Minneapolis (or Mini-No-Place, as my father likes to refer to it) to Baltimore had been canceled.
Ruh oh, Raggy.
Now I knew this winter storm thing was mucking things up on the East Coast, but CNN.com led me to believe that flights were mainly getting canceled from Pennsylvania northward to New York City. I figured getting from here to Minneapolis would be easy, and since the storm seemed to be north of Baltimore, he should arrive home at the scheduled time of 10:30pm Eastern.
I was wrong.
I told him to call Dad, since Dad, being a dad, can fix all things. The best Dad could come up with is a flight from Minneapolis to Detroit, to get him out of Minnesota. Apparently if he hadn't taken that flight, he would have been stuck in Minneapolis until Monday.
Unfortunately poor Mark is stuck in Detroit until Sunday. This means he has to spend a day and a half in Detroit, all by himself. I can't imagine being stuck in an airport for so long. Granted, he is a grown man, being 18 and all, but this is really the first plane trip he's taken by himself without going with a church group or a school group or with family. Poor guy. It's a helluva learning experience.
And what the crap is up with this damn winter weather anyhow?? It's freakin' March, for cryin' out loud! It'll be spring in five days!!!
*sigh*
Now for the interesting news. Remember Grace's art teacher, the one I wasn't all too keen on because she sort of talked over the kids' heads?
Funnily enough, she tried teaching the kids "Roy G. Biv" (ie, Red Orange Yellow Green Blue Indigo and Violet, a way to remember the colors of the rainbow) today.
But I digress.
Thankfully, Loud Lady wasn't there today, so I was able to tell the art teacher quietly that Kurt had been extended an extra month on his deployment, and since she herself is the wife of a retired submariner, she totally understood my frustration. It's funny -- we surface folks call 'em "deployments" and submariners call 'em "patrols." When she talks to me, she always asks me how much longer Kurt's patrol is. It makes me giggle.
Anyhoo, these last few classes, when I've been able to get a word in edgewise around Loud Lady, the art teacher and I have sort of started to bond. I think she appreciates how much I get into what she's teaching the kids. She's not just the art teacher for toddlers; she does most of the painting classes at my town's rec center.
I'm sort of kicking myself that I didn't like her so much at the outset of the class. I think what happened is I had told my good friend AS that we were taking this class before we started. She informed me that her little girl had been signed up for the class the semester before, but AS hated it so much that she only went to the first class. I guess I was biased against it when I walked into the class.
I know better!!! Not everyone likes the same things; not everyone enjoys the same kinds of people. I shouldn't let someone else's perceptions color my own. But I did.
What got me is after class, the art teacher was cleaning off the plates we'd used as palettes (it cracks me up that her plates are the same clover-printed Corelle plates my parents had when they first got married in the early 70s), and I was chatting with her as I cleaned up Grace. It's amazing all the little nooks and crannies a toddler is able to get paint, especially when there is glitter paint involved.
The art teacher told me that she was so glad I had signed up for the class because she so enjoyed my company. She had even mentioned me to her husband as a kind of kindred spirit!
My jaw about broke from the force of it hitting the floor.
She then went on to offer her husband's assistance in anything I needed while Kurt's gone. She also told me that we should get together sometime, even if it's just to head over to her house to do some extracurricular art activities for me to send to family back home or to Kurt. When I told her I probably wouldn't need her husband's assistance, although I appreciated it highly (I am quite self-sufficient when it comes to most home repairs), I most likely was most in need of just company. She told me that it was a done deal, that we'd definitely have to get together sometime.
At that point, Grace had decided that she had enough of not being able to paint, and if she wasn't able to make a mess, why should she stick around in the art room any longer? So then I had to run after her to make sure she didn't join either the preschool in session or the aerobics class.
I am just floored that this lady seems to think so highly of me, after I went into her class with pre-conceived notions that weren't very good. I guess that'll teach me not to judge a book by its cover.
PS -- Please keep my brother in your thoughts and prayers, that he makes it back to DC as soon and as safely as possible.