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Impending Insomnia

I'm back from Texas, and I wrote a real entry on the plane. I'll append this entry tomorrow with the text from my plane entry. If I remember correctly, I knock Texas a lot.

So tonight is the first night I'll be alone in the house in a long time. I'm used to sleeping alone in hotels while traveling, but in a rare turn of events, Ryan is traveling, thus leaving me and Eli to tool around the empty house. Eli's down wit dat as it is his usual gig, however big old house + nearing Fourth of July weekend = paranoid woman sleeping with an extra large MagLite Flashlight next to her bed. The best way to describe my neighborhood is that it is not a suburb, and it is not the ghetto. It is a perfectly nice neighborhood, however it is bordered by some low income housing, and there is ample access to the fireworks stands. On occasion, a bad element will find its way into the low income housing causing sirens to blare and stereotypes to perpetuate. For the most part, this is the exception, not the rule; however one does learn to keep their eyes open and their doors locked. So on nights like tonight, alone in my big house, I get a bit paranoid. The early release of a barrage of fireworks isn't helping much. That and I watched a bit of the local news, which always makes one expect the worst out of every situation.

Also not helping much is a freakish strain in my left hand connecting my index finger to my thumb on the top of my hand. It is really hard to type with this weird strain! What the hell???

Okay, so anyhow, I'm a bit freaked out, but nothing major. The fireworks have stopped for now. I suppose if I can't sleep, I'll just root through a bunch of boxes looking for MyPod. Seriously - with the hand! Typing the word boxes about killed me! Yeeouch!

Since I have a whole entry just waiting to append this entry I'll stop now. More tomorrow! F'in hand!

Updated with Entry Typed on the Plane:

Oh to be home. I am almost there. Well, I�m probably flying over Oklahoma right now, but we are certainly closer to home than we are Texas. I can�t stop yawning despite getting plenty of sleep last night. I think sleep in hotels shouldn�t count as sleep. Something about getting used to the on and off of the air conditioning and being woken up by the sound of your bill being slid under the door at 3:00 am and then again at 5:00 am when the USA Today thuds in front of your door. The hotel we stayed at in Corpus is like many others in their superstitions. Those on the 14th floor were lured into a false sense of security by the renaming of their floor. One counting from the outside of the building would have recognized that floor as the 13th floor, but inside the building, the numbering skipped from 12 to 14. Are people really that scared of the number 13 or is that just a Texas thing? I made a mental note to research this in my upcoming travels.

I just yawned again. Maybe I�m tired because the stewardess woke me up from a nice deep sleep to offer me something to drink. When I refused her offer, she persisted, trying to pawn off a bag of pretzels on me. Thank you, no. I�d prefer a few minutes of shut eye. But alas, it was not to be, so here I am typing up a journal entry that I�ll probably forget to upload.

We�ve just started our initial descent into Kansas City. Home sweet home! My day is mostly gone now, however, as it will be after 7:00 pm before I leave the airport. If anyone out there still thinks that business travel is glamorous, I�ve got a few stories to tell you. Most of them involve vomit, the threat of vomit or the remnants of vomit. Why on the flight from Dallas to Corpus Christi, I was assaulted with the distinct smell of vomit. I quickly searched around me, but could find no evidence other than the smell. The vomit was gone, but not forgotten.

Corpus was windy and hot, but I was told that it wasn�t wind whipping my hair into a discernable state, but a nice breeze envied by other Texans and even visitors from Louisiana. At the airport in Dallas, signs on their inter-terminal trains bragged of being the longest inter-airport transit system. They even made mention of the famous voice that told you when the doors were closing and what terminal was coming up next. Leave it to a bunch of Texans to brag about the features and benefits of a transit system required due to the inefficiencies of building an airport over miles and miles of land. So many things in Texas reference Texas and gloat about Texas it drives me crazy. I don�t know why, but I really don�t like that state. I think it is in part just to balance out the crazy blind love that state receives from its residents, past and present. Texans love Texas, so I guess it is my job as a non-Texan to hate the living daylights out of it despite the fact that it never really did anything to me. Stupid Texas.

I�m craving a nice icy cold Dr. Pepper right now. I spent the past couple of days drinking Diet Coke because Diet Mountain Dew was unavailable. I was able to order a Dr. Pepper at lunch, or so I thought. I instantly recognized it as Mr. Pibb served with overly large ice cubes. That, my friends, is a recipe for nasty syrupy badness. I blamed it on Texas, but it happens in Kansas and Missouri, too.

Speaking of nasty, I hear it is supposed to be in the upper 90�s with crazy humidity when I land in Kansas City. Midwesterners love to talk of the heat index or wind chill factoring in all of the elements that make it either hotter or colder than the mercury reads. This allows us to complain about 110 degree summers and sub-zero degree weather. Shit. I gotta go. Time to turn off all electronic equipment. Later!

9:46 p.m. - June 29, 2005

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