Update -- from Chicago

It is certainly a good thing that I can touch type, as many of the letters have simply washed off the keyboard at home. The reason I mention this is that I am typing in the dark, trying not to wake up anyone by turning on the lights.  (I'm not in the same room as them or the typing itself would keep them up.  Maybe I could have the lights on, but it doesn't really seem to affect my typing.)

What’s particularly interesting is that I never took any formal typing classes in high school for example, but I simply learned the keyboard in college when I was typing an enormous number of papers and journal entries. I actually remember the process where late at night I would be thinking of some sentence and basically watching it typed out on a keyboard in my head. This was pretty distracting for a while, though it obviously paid off.  (I think I also mentioned that I did pretty well as a temp for a few years.)  I also had this weird thing where I would be thinking of people in the dorm and then start thinking about them as the face cards in a deck of playing cards (I was playing a lot of cards at the time).

Well, it has been unbelievably stressful in terms of work and then cutting it close in getting to the airport. (I really didn’t want to pull the kids out early, since they are already missing a full day of school.)  The cabbie ran into very heavy traffic and it was not even 4 pm. The Gardiner was a total mess, though fortunately he didn’t insist on taking it. Then it turns out the stupid pedestrian bridge to the Island Airport is not open yet (it was supposed to be, but now they are saying it will open in the winter). That added another 15 minutes to the trip. (Thank goodness we had completely checked in on-line.) And for some crazy reason they only had one line open for the security screening for flights to the U.S. Now after we were through security we had close to 30 minutes to sit and relax (a tiny bit). That’s the main advantage – it only takes a few minutes to board a Porter flight, so you really can show up just an hour before and still make your flight.

The flight wasn’t too bad, though I think we ran into some headwinds and it was longer than our last trip. Hopefully going back will be a bit faster then.

It was super stressful trying to deal with the CTA, though I guess we’ve got it figured out, except if I take the kids on Sat. and my wife isn’t around for me to use her Ventra card. Hopefully we can coordinate and leave at the same time. Anyway it wasn’t so bad leaving on the Orange Line, but the Red Line we picked a bad car and to make it infinitely worse my wife sat next to some wino who proceeded to bug her the entire trip. (She has totally lost her street sense...) And whatever the CTA did to speed up the Red Line south of Cermak/Chinatown has failed. It was just interminably slow.

Towards the end of the trip, the wino starting trying to sell these nasty and yet clearly stolen hats. Then he light up a cigarillo and got a bunch of people yelling at him, and then he proceeded to get in a huge argument and claim he was going to pull a knife on this young man. It has been a not-so-gradual process, but now I thoroughly hate the south side of Chicago. I really do not want to stay here on our next visit and am actually thinking seriously of subletting an apartment instead.

Our fears were justified and our daughter threw up on the platform (just mercifully making it off the train). She says it is the long ride and not having the right kind of food in her stomach, though I suspect the stress of the crazy man (and then my stress in being around him) contributed. But it just makes it almost impossible to know whether we can safely travel with her. She throws up in cabs and she often throws up on the second leg of transit trips. But it isn’t all the time, and it frequently doesn’t happen when we are driving ourselves around. If that were the case, we would just not travel. Still, the places I want to try to go to over spring break all have terrible transit connections to the airport. I am so ready for her to be a couple of years older when she should finally be over this. I don’t like the small child phase at all and I certainly can’t conceive of why some people would constantly want babies and toddlers around.

So that was getting here.  I am hoping today goes a bit more smoothly.  The way back should be a little less stressful, since we don't have nearly as much time pressure.  And then I technically have Monday off (Canadian Thanksgiving), though I am sure I will have to do some work to catch up, and perhaps even try to get ahead of the curve with writing this next proposal so that doesn't end up quite so last minute.