long loca story

Today the window guys showed up at 7 am to try to finish putting all of my windows in before I had to leave at 1245 to catch my shuttle.

Things were cranking along nicely, and I had gotten out of my funk and was working on something, when a cranky contractor came by and started yelling at my window installers for putting in vinyl windows.

A word on my windows. I bought the best window on the market. Vinyl, I know, has a shitty sound to it, but they actually look just like my neighbors' windows because there is so much wood around them (they replaced the wooden frame things and you can barely see any of the whatever that border thing is around the windows). And from an environmental perspective, they are better than wood windows. I should also note that I only found one contractor that could build from wood the windows for my house. He said it would take 6 weeks, and the front window priced in at $5,000. Yikes.

About a half hour later, an inspector showed up with a stop work order (still taped to my front window) and said they hadn't pulled a permit. I double checked with the office, who double checked with the city, who said that no permit was needed. My installer said in the 17 years he's been doing this he's never had that happen. Also, the city inspector gave a stop work order but told them to keep installing the windows.

I read the stop work order. It said I could get a $999 fine and 30 days in jail. Great.

My shuttle was 1/2 hour late picking me up at the airport. Then I got the security full monty because I booked a ticket to the UAE less than 24 hours before flying. Ech.

When it seemed things were finally going to be okay, even though I had to spend the entire two hour flight from Denver to Chicago sitting next to two obnoxious 10 year old girls, I started to relax.

But then, when we landed, our gate wasn't open so we had to sit on the runway for 10 minutes. The girls next to me kept standing up and the stewardess was screaming at them to put their seat belts on. We got to the gate but the jet way wouldn't extend, so we were stuck on the plane for another 20 minutes waiting for them to fix it.

Tick tock, tick tock.

As we waited I heard a woman behind me saying she was going to Dhabi. I told her I was too, and she asked me to run ahead (we only had an hour til our flight took off at this point) and tell them she was coming (she's a slow walker).

I had to take a train to the international terminal and it took forever for the train to come. Then I had to run (and I did run) to the check in desk because I didn't have a ticket (since I booked my flight less than 24 hours before take off I couldn't check in online). They were announcing the boarding as I was running to the desk.

They couldn't hold the plane, and they couldn't get our luggage off the plane (mine and the woman I met on the flight, Espie). So they booked Espie and I on tomorrow's 830 PM flight (total suck, get in at 8 pm, have to be at a meeting the next morning at 7 am). Then Espie and I were given vouchers for a hotel. We shuffled off, sans luggage, to find the free shuttle to the hotel.

We just got back from dinner, which was a nice experience. Dr. Espie (she's a phd!) and I had a lot of things in common. She is of Mexican origin and she is going to invite me to a dinner that she throws for her female emirati students and she's going to make real corn tortillas from scratch. She said she wants to read my book when it's done.

Her dad left her mom when she was young and her mom raised 6 girls by herself working even though she didn't speak english. And Espie ended up with a phd from Berkeley. She told me this story at dinner about how she was in a workshop and one of the guys said "we're all here because we've had such privileged educations". That made Dr. Espie cry because she was always put in vocational classes because people thought that because she was the child of an immigrant from mexico she must be stupid and they lived in a pretty shit part of LA. She never finished high school but then had an opportunity to go to college and then she ended up in fucking Berkeley, which, not to be biased, is one of the best universities in the world. Very cool.

I told Dr. Espie that I found her inspiring, and she laughed. She said she found it inspiring that I was writing a book about my injury and subsequent athletic adventures. Then she said "we have a word for people like you in our culture - loca".

If I'm crazy, it's because of my travel schedule, and life in general. And people wonder why I drink.