Clouds so swift, the rains falling in

[austin_dern]

Last month --- yeah, I'm still catching up with stuff I did, but it's just this trip back East and then FurFright that need reporting --- work flew me back east mostly for the purpose of a meeting about a technology solution thingy and so I could get caught in a weird looping unending conversation with a client. The journey started with an early morning flight, as I wanted to have some margin in case of catastrophic flight delays like August's implied, early enough that I had a taxi instead of forcing bunny_hugger to wake and shower and change into enough presentability to drive to the airport.

We were happily short of any scheduling emergencies or disasters, though, and I arrived in Newark on time. I'd flown out of Lansing rather than Detroit, incurring some extra expense --- to be passed on to my employers, yes, but I didn't feel terribly guilty about that because if flying back turned into a mess I wanted bunny_hugger to have to pick me up from Lansing at some awful hour of the night, not from Detroit or another of the many airports 75 minutes away. And I used a Hertz car rental that was physically on the Newark airport grounds, rather than a shuttle ride away, since that had left me anxious about timing back in August. That was fine, but when the agent asked if I wanted insurance, I said yes, and then thought to ask how much it was; when I learned it was $30 per day I realized that was unacceptable, but I wasn't forceful enough to get that cancelled. Again, it's something my boss would cover, but I felt guilty about something so extravagantly marginal of use. It left me thinking I'd better have an accident so this would be worth it.

I did get back to my parents' home, and in pretty good time too, since my mother was going to be off Friday morning. She and her college friends --- my aunts, I've called them --- had been planning to spend the weekend in South Carolina for a year plus now and weren't going to be diverted by my last-minute work trip, plus it's not like I particularly needed her watching over me. Amused yet? How about this, then:

My father had figured, as long as his wife was off on a girls' weekend down south, he could take the train up to Boston and see his other granddaughter and her parents. So for most of my weekend back east, I'd be alone, with the cats. At least it saved my parents the cost of a cat-sitter, which my employer would not have otherwise covered.

Trivia: When the word ``insult'' entered the English language in the late 16th century it meant to boast or brag, particularly in a scornful way, synonymous to ``exult''. Source: Semantic Antics: How And Why Words Change Meaning, Sol Steinmetz.

Currently Reading: The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways, Earl Swift.