More Cheese Never Hurt Anyone at 7:55 AM

Note: I wrote most of this yesterday and didn’t get around to posting it.  

My final trip to Wisconsin for training started off interestingly enough yesterday morning.  First let me preface by saying I have a hard time sleeping the night before I’m going to travel.  So I knew there was a chance for shenanigans when I booked an airport shuttle to pick me up from my house at 6:00 yesterday morning.  It wouldn’t have been a big deal if Jessica was home, but she and Luke are currently in Delaware.  

So anyway, I didn’t get to sleep until about 2:00 Sunday morning.  I woke up to the doorbell ringing at 5:45.  This was not the most soothing wake-up call I have ever had.  I set the alarm on my new cell phone (which merits a tangent, by the way.  I’ve recently taken up disc golfing.  And by “taken up”, I mean that Zimm and his brother-in-law and I all went one time, and then I bought my own discs.  There’s a course in Kokomo, and one of the “holes”—I’m not sure what you call them, really—has a large water hazard.  Were I able to throw a disc straight yet, this wouldn’t be a problem.  Of course, I haven’t yet acquired that skill.  So when we came to this particular part of the course, I used Zimm’s aptly named “floater disc”, which, when thrown into water, will float.  (Told you it was aptly named.)   It’s not hard to see where this is going, is it?  So I threw the disc, and much to my chagrin, it landed out in the middle of this pond over which we were supposed to throw the discs.  Now, even though the floating of the disc itself is a good thing, it still doesn’t magically come motoring toward the shore.  So I had to wade out and get it.  I was wearing shorts, so that wasn’t a huge deal.  Zimm said that the water wasn’t too deep, and it wasn’t, but the silt at the bottom tends to sink a large fellow like myself a little deeper than say, a bottom made of rocks would.  I went in not expecting to get wet up to my waist, so I didn’t think of emptying my pockets.  But when I started to sink, I decided it wasn’t worth the slow walking when I could just swim out into the middle faster than I could walk.  And thus, I came out all wet.  It didn’t even dawn on me for a little while that both my cell phone and wallet were still in my pockets when I went out there.  The phone was loathe to turn on while wet, and after I got home I wasn’t able to turn it on then either.  So luckily we qualified for a free upgrade—thus the new phone.  The old phone, incidentally, has started working again.  End of tangent.)

So I set the alarm on my cell phone, but when it went off, either I didn’t hear it or I got up and turned it off and laid back down without remembering it (I put it across the room so that I’d have to get up to turn it off).  So anyway, the doorbell woke me up, and I ran and got dressed and told the driver (who was all dressed in chauffer gear, which I found interesting at the time, seeing as how I had just booked a sedan to come get me) I’d be out in a few minutes.  And what was sitting in my driveway when I gathered my things and went outside?  A white stretch limousine.  I’m not even kidding.  If my camera hadn’t been packed and I hadn’t been half asleep, I would’ve taken a picture.  

I got in and was greeted by fiber optic lights and artificial…stars or something on the ceiling.  There were also all sorts of knobs and buttons, the function of which I could not decipher.  Whether this was due to my grogginess or their complexity I do not know, though I lean toward the former.  So I’m rolling through Kokomo in this limo, and I look down at my white T-shirt that I quickly grabbed as I was heading out, and there’s ice cream on it.  Now I feel like a big winner.  In hindsight, the driver could have said something, you know?  I told him I overslept, and he knew I must’ve just thrown it on.  He couldn’t tell me I was going to travel all day with dribbles on my shirt?  (My wife is sick right now, I’m sure—I didn’t tell her this part of the story yesterday.)  When I got out at the airport, I pretty much felt like some dude that wandered out of a trailer park and found a coupon for a free limo ride.  

That’s it for now…this week’s saga will continue later.  (My Pearl Jam review is up now, in case anyone is interested.)