Susan’s Journal

First we hopped on our free flight to Arkansas. It was free because Bud got it with his Frequent Flier Miles. It was a tiny plane, and we were across the aisle from each other, but hey… it meant we both had an aisle seat! It was a small, uneventful flight, and in fifty-one minutes we were in Arkansas.

We were in Arkansas longer than we were on the plane. Originally, we were to only have an hour layover; but they were offering vouchers for people to wait, so we waited! Instead of having lunch in Chicago, we had it in the beautiful Arkansas airport, and we have $600 worth of travel vouchers to show for it. Let me tell you: if you’re ever in that airport in Arkansas, and you go to that only little food place that has sandwiches, get the tuna salad croissant. It is absolutely to die for. Sometimes it’s the little things.

We arrived in Chicago, arrived at our hotel, and then decided to go on an adventure: find the Apple store in Chicago, and see if I could get my iPhone screen replaced. See, about three months ago I dropped it flat on its face on the cement garage floor, and the screen spiderweb-shattered. I had been told it would be $200 to replace the phone–that they couldn’t just replace the screen–unless I took it to an after-market place, which I really didn’t want to do. Also, since the new iPhone was sure to come out in a few months, I just couldn’t see spending the money. So I went back to my old first-gen iPhone that couldn’t take video (*gasp*), couldn’t send MMS photo messages (*choke*), and couldn’t have the new iOS 4 phone operating system (*faint*). I limped along with it for three months; but then an AT&T store associate friend of ours, and Bud–wonderful Bud, said, “Why don’t we give it a try?”

So we parked, and we walked. We walked a mile… in the wrong direction. Then we walked back the way we should have gone, where the Apple store had actually only been a few blocks from the car, and we walked right by Michigan Avenue. What’s so special about Michigan Avenue in July, you ask? Well, they were filming the new Transformers movie. I saw smoke… piled-up cars… crowds of people gaping… and I was worried… until I overheard a man, standing near a red light, saying, “Yeah, it’s Transformers. They’re filming Transformers down there.” We confirmed this heresy several times over the course of the evening. Cool stuff–probably the closest I’ve ever been to the filming of a movie. In fact, we walked directly beneath it–beneath the bridge, where it was being filmed on the bridge above us.

We finally found the Apple store, thanks to Bud’s new iPhone 4 with GPS. This means a little blue bong-ing dot, like that on a submarine, showed us where we were walking. Who was there to greet us at the Apple store? Shia LeBouf! Well, it wasn’t really Shia himself; it was just a gigantic GQ magazine cover right inside the store entrance; but it was still pretty cool.

After an hour of walking, and walking in the wrong direction, and the muggy heat, and the haven’t-had-dinner-yet-and-it’s-eight, I was a little cranky. Not like bite-your-head-off cranky, but just bleah-I’m-tired-leave-me-alone cranky. We waited in line, to find out we were in the wrong line, then headed upstairs to the right line, to wait, and find out that we’d have to go on a list, and it would probably be half an hour. In Apple speak, that meant it would be at least an hour. I’ve learned this by now. The lady was nice enough–very nice, in fact–but I wasn’t sure I wanted to wait at that point. Let’s just go, I told Bud. Let’s just stay, he said to me. So we stayed… and oh I love my Bud, I’m so glad we did.

We got a nice, friendly, skinny young guy, who gasped when he saw the spider-web shattered screen; and when he saw how tired I was, he said well normally we charge $200 to replace the screen, but I’m going to take care of it. I could have kissed him–well, if I was single, and he was twenty years older. Ten minutes later, he came back, and there was this beautiful, working, crystal-clear iPhone 3Gs. Not the latest and greatest, but darnit it’s my phone, and it works and it’s awesome.

“I wanted to let you know that when I did open it up, I did find some water damage,” he said to me. “There’s going to be a four hundred dollar charge for the repair because of it.”

I looked up at him. I stared blankly. I didn’t get it. Then Bud busted out laughing. The guy was pulling my leg. Whew… and darnit at the same time. At least I had my phone.

Bud knew I was extremely hungry and tired, and he did a wonderful thing for me–he found the closest Buffalo Wild Wings. We had wings, we drank Diet Coke, and we played Buzztime Trivia. All was right with the world.

The next morning we had breakfast at the hotel. It was complimentary, thanks to Bud’s triple-black-diamond-platinum traveller status. I picked out waffles and potatoes, but when I got to the table where the syrup was, I only found a just-about-empty bottle of sugar free syrup. I went back to our table, and there was Bud, waiting for me with a great big full bottle of sugar free syrup. My Bud.

Our first order of business for the day was a pre-check of where we would park for the concert. We discovered it would be $20 to park right at the place, or it would be freeeee to park at one of the train stations and take one of the chartered busses to the Ravinia. We chose the latter, and picked the lot where we would park.

Now it was off to Milwaukee. Why Milwaukee? Why, because we hadn’t been there before. It sounded like a neat idea to make the short one-hour drive and take a tour of a brewery–something we could say we had done. On the way, we saw two things of interest–an apparent military craft graveyard, and a cheese castle. I dropped pins on my practically-new iPhone 3Gs map (hooray!) and we continued on our way.

The brewery tour was pretty darn cool. We learned about the Miller family, about how they made soft drinks to survive through prohibition, and the thing I thought was the coolest–literally–the underground caves that they packed with winter mountain ice to keep the beer cool in the summertime. How neat is that? We had our pictures taken, and we had three free beers–which we really only drank one of–and we were off on our way again.

The first stop was the Cheese Castle. It was a store, it was a castle, and it was full of cheese… and summer sausages… and candy. It was actually pretty neat. Bud picked out some meats and stuff he liked, and we headed on down the road.

About fifteen minutes later we headed off the road to what ended up being the Russell War Museum. Bud said it was the biggest collection of Sherman tanks he had ever seen in one place. There were helicopters, hummers, and Higgins boats (oh my!) Even though I’m not a huge history buff like Bud is, I have to admit I was pretty darn impressed. I asked all kinds of questions, and I learned all kinds of neat things.

Dinner was back near our hotel at an irish place called Hackney’s. I had a burger, and Bud had a steak. Sorry, Hackney’s, but it was nothing spectacular.

We freshened up and headed out to our parking place–Parking Lot C. A shuttle bus took about twenty of us and dumped us off in front of the Ravinia. We weren’t prepared for what we saw.

There were thousands of people there. I mean thousands and thousands and thousands. I think I heard that there were fifty thousand people there. The Ravinia is like a giant park, and there just happens to be a pavilion there where they hold concerts. So 90% of the people there could *hear* the music, but couldn’t *see* anything. I couldn’t understand going to a Sting concert without getting to see the show.

I didn’t have to worry. Bud got good tickets–really good. We had no idea where we were going, so we stopped a young lady who worked there, and her eyes got big. “You guys haven’t been here before, have you?” she asked. We shook our heads. “You’re waaaay down there,” she said. She pointed, and we walked. We were only about twenty rows from the stage. I was very thrilled.

We put down our t-shirts and programs and watched an incredible show–Sting with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. They played a wide, wide variety of his music–from The Police all the way up to now–and I loved it all. Out of about twenty songs, I think there were two I didn’t know. It was definitely the best Sting concert I’ve ever been to.

…and I had my Bud there with me too.

When we arrived at the show, the sun was going down. When we left the show, it was pitch dark. Of course, all fifty thousand people left the show at the same time. Of course, all of them wanted to get on shuttle busses to their cars. Of course, the line was a half mile long–no joking–by the time we got to it.

How far away can our car possibly be? We started to wonder. Then we started to wander. We asked several parking lot attendants, and we got everything from “you guys can hoof it easy” to “it’s far. It’s like, real far.” Out came the iPhone 4 again, and between Bud and I we plotted a course to the lot where the car was. Two miles. That’s nothing! It took us half an hour, and it was an awesome, fun, giggly, conversation-filled half hour. It was one of my favorite parts of the weekend; and I guarantee, by the time we got to our car, I still wouldn’t have been to the front of that long line.

A stop at 7-Eleven was essential–we were both parched and looking for snacks. It was just the icing on the cake of what was a wonderful evening.

We flew home the next morning. The weekend was fun, full of memories, and very very wonderful.

- Posted from my iPad

This is my first blog post on my new iPad. We’re on a plane to Boston, where we’ll spend the weekend together. I’m going to show Bud a bunch of scenes from my life, including some I’ve never shown anyone. No, not anyone.

Those of you who know me know i didn’t originally have any interest in an iPad. Travelling this summer for work, though, I’ve started reading a lot of eBooks. I downloaded the Barnes & Noble eBook reader to my iPhone, and i discovered that they have quite a few good eBooks for free.

I found out along the way that three of my friends from work have the Nook, the eBook reader that Barnes & Noble sells. The cool thing about it is the fact that you can “lend” books to people, and they can read them for two weeks.

Bud, however, has a Kindle. He loves it, and it has 3G internet access, something the nook doesn’t have (you can only get on the web via wifi). If I ended up with a kindle, though, i wouldn’t be able to read my free B&N eBooks, and I wouldn’t be able to share books with friends.

So I spent a few weeks in a toss-up. I didn’t really want to lug books around on planes anymore, and the constant flip-flip-flip of pages while reading the iPhone, coupled with the fact that it killed the phone’s battery on a flight, made me long for something better.

So a few days ago, on one of many flights home from Virginia, (sitting in first class, which Bud arranged, might I add), I got my first close-up look at an iPad. The lady sitting next to me had one, and she was reading a book with it, then watching a movie, then listening to some music. She talked about editing Word and Excel on it too.

She got me thinking. Here is a device that I can download *both* B&N and Kindle apps for, is backlit (which neither of the eReaders are), and that i can also watch movies on–or type blog posts, like i am now. I talked to Bud about it, and he told me to go to the Apple store and play with one.

So I did. Yesterday morning I showed up at the store just minutes after it opened and started to play with one. I watched a few CNN videos, I watched the “goat is dead” video on YouTube and laughed, I watched the video for “Fireflies”, and I checked out the iBook app. I also opened up Notepad (or whatever the hell Apple calls it) and typed a few lines. I typed very, very fast on the keyboard, which surprised me. Then I found a keyboard app, which I plinked away with my piano lesson training, and giggled. I was sold.

There were a few more customers in the store now, and none of the associates were free. I stood around for a few minutes before I realized I should make an “appointment.” Hey, no laughing, I almost never go to the Apple store. I signed in with one of their computers–it said my appointment was in ten minutes–and i waited.

And waited.

After about an hour and a half of waiting, I was getting discouraged. Half an hour after my assigned appointment time, my name hadn’t even shown up on the twelve-man list yet. I’m sure I was starting to look harried, because a young girl with a piercing through her lower lip found her way to me. I told her I had made an appointment, and she looked it up on the computer. Apparently something or rather I hadn’t make the right kind of appointment. She said shed find someone to help me, it would just be a minute, and she vanished. Thirty seconds later, a kind older man employee walked up to me.

He told me they were out of stock. All of them, every flavor.

He suggested i get on a “reserve list,” and when one came in they would call me. The problem was, by the estimated time they would come in, i would be gone to Virginia again, and they would have to give it to someone else if I didn’t pick it up. I had him put my name on the list anyways, thanked him, and left. I felt defeated.

When I got home, though, I followed a suggestion the man made, and I called another Apple store nearby, even though I was positive they wouldn’t have any in stock. One time it was busy, and one time no one answered after about twenty rings. I was kind of jet-lag tired, so I laid down on the couch with the ceiling fan on for a snooze.

I woke up two hours later, at 3:30pm. Whoops. I hadn’t meant to sleep that long.

Half-asleep, I picked up my cell phone and re-dialed that other Apple store. A nice lady answered, and she told me they had the iPad I wanted in stock, but that she couldn’t hold one for me, and they had “under 10.” Under ten could mean nine, or it could mean two. My instinct told me to go for it. I threw on a different shirt–I was in such a hurry I’m lucky i didn’t put it on backwards–grabbed my GPS off my bed, got the address off the screen of my laptop, and flew out the door.

I didn’t grab the power cord of the GPS, but i figured I knew pretty much where the place was, so I wouldn’t get lost. Ten minutes from the house, though, I realized I didn’t have my phone either. Bud was coming over after work, and i hadn’t told him where I’d be. Whoops again.

I flew through traffic, somehow feeling like I was in a contest with someone else to get the last iPad. When the GPS announced “You have reached your destination,” I saw that I was in front of a mall. I hadn’t thought this Apple store was in a mall; I must have been thinking of some other place.

A few feet from the front door of the mall, i stopped a well-dressed thin black man with a Starbucks cup who looked like he might know where the Apple store was. He did. “Go towards Macy’s, turn left, and… It’s down there,” he said. I thanked him graciously and walked into the mall.

It huge. There were rushing fountains. I was at an intersection where I had to go right or left, but there was no Macy’s in sight, and there was no idiot-direction signs in sight. I stepped up to a man sitting on a bench, apparently waiting for his wife while he shopped, and asked him which way Macy’s was. He pointed, and I was off.

I swear I walked for about a quarter mile before i got to the Apple store. It was a madhouse. There was barely room to walk. Somehow, though, a young man saw me through the crowd and walked up to me. He asked me if he could help, and I told him what I wanted. He said he’d look to see if they had any left. I followed him.

They had three. Only three of the 64GB wifi ones. Interestingly, there was about twelve of the 3G network version ones–apparently people didn’t want those so much. I didn’t. If I’m in a bind and I need to check my email where there’s not wifi, I still have my iPhone.

So here I am. I have all my music and a dozen or so movies synched up to the iPad. So far in this flight I’ve watched half a movie, read a few dozen pages of a book, and written this big long blog post. All that, not to mention this ipad is nice and small and will fit just about everywhere. I’m definitely happy with my decision.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Meet Rocky.

For a few years now, every time we go eat at this particular pizza place, the kids drag me by the hand next door into the pet shop. We wander through the puppies and the birdies and the… rats, and we always seem to end up in front of the turtle tanks. The kids walk away as I stay, mezmerized, watching the turtles with a piece of lettuce, chomp…. chomp…. chomping away, ever so slowly. One look at the price tags, though–between one and two hundred dollars–and I keep walking.

Enter stage left, a lady friend of mine from work. She was talking about this and that, and somehow turtles came into the conversation. She raises them and knows a lot about them. At the time of our conversation, she had two little baby ones.

“Any chance I could have one of those?”

…and before I knew it, she was bringing one into work in a opaque plastic ice cream container with knife holes poked in the top. He was a hundred times cuter than I thought he would be, and he’s only about twice the size of a quarter. I was lucky enough to snap this picture the first night we had him home; and as you can see, he’s pretty happy with his new home, because he’s smiling.

Dylan had him named before I brought him home–Rocky. Of course, Dylan had no idea who “Rocky” was, so I had to go on youTube (which seemed comical in itself) to find a video of Sylvester Stallone running through Philly. Dylan reaction was pretty much, yeah okay.

So meet Rocky. He lives in a ten gallon tank that Bud graciously bought us without asking, with little pebble rocks that he bought without asking, with turtle kibbles that he bought without asking. He also went down the street from his house to the creek bed to dig up three or four big, flat rocks for Rocky to rest on, basking in his heat lamp. There’s four inches of water in the tank, and a rock-pile-looking filter that cascades water through and keeps it clean; so now there’s a constant soothing waterfall sound in my house (though it verges on the edge of the sound of someone peeing).

This is one happy turtle. And I’ve got one happy Dylan.

Dylan went to his first air show today. Bud got him up at the crack of dawn and brought him out towards Fort Worth, and they watched airplanes together. They had a great guy day together, topping it off with an OMNIMAX movie and popcorn.

While they went east, the girls and I went north. They allowed me twenty minutes in Kohl’s to use the coupons I had, and in return I took them to Dave and Buster’s. I finished my unremarkable burger as they kept coming back to the booth with mounds and mounds of tickets. They spent 98% of them in the ticket-store, and we headed back home with our armfuls of ticket prize junk.

Somehow I managed to sleep until after ten this morning. It has left me feeling strange and overtired—like somehow I need five more hours of sleep. I’ve had trouble catching up on sleep for a few weeks now; and no matter how much I can catch, I don’t seem like I’m catching enough.

Back to work before seven tomorrow… and time marches on.

Welcome to Yogurtville. Michelle told me about this neat place after church one Sunday. We didn’t even wait a whole week before checking it out. One wall of the place is all frozen yogurt machines–like soft serve ice cream–with flavors like cookies and cream, and mint chocolate, and rasbperry. After you pick your ice cream, you head to the fruit and candy bar, where you top your frozen yogurt with all kinds of wonderful, delightful treats. My favorites: Junior Mints and Reese’s Pieces! You pay for your masterpiece by weight; for the three of us, it averages about fifteen dollars. Well, well worth the money… and a lot of fun!

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You don’t have to spend a fortune to have a good time.

Yesterday morning at about 7am or so I received a txt message… “Would you like to have Rain and Dylan today and this evening?” He also said I could keep them overnight. The only caveat was that I had to go pick them up. No problem! So I scooted into the shower and headed in that direction.

Back at the house, we didn’t have an awfully eventful day. We wrote out a little checklist of things to do, as we had done in the previous days I had worked from home; but at some point, somehow, we lost the list. I thought I was going crazy. It was one of those “it was right here” things, but we just couldn’t find it.

I mean, it wasn’t like I needed a list to keep the kids occupied and having fun; but it did have some ideas that I’m sure I forgot about. Everyone kind of seemed in a lazy mood anyways, so we just had hot dogs for lunch, and they laid around watching “My Name Is Earl” episodes during the afternoon, from a Netflix DVD I had gotten.

The real fun began after 7pm.

We packed up the car with some folding chairs and a beach bag with a blanket, then headed to Subway for a relatively healthy to-go dinner. It got stuffed into the beach bag on top of the blanket. Our next destination was the park in town, for a picnic dinner and to hear some great live music.

I just realized that this post is a group of short little paragraphs–kind of Twitter style. Is that because I’ve been getting back into Twitter a bunch lately? Just food for thought, I thought it was kind of funny.

The band that was playing in our town is called Professor D, and they are awesome. They’re a cover band, but put on an incredible show, and are incredible singers and talents, every one of them. I had seen them live with my singles meetup group at several different venues, and I knew the kids would love this show.

After inhaling our grinders and sodas at our designated beach-blanket-and-folding-chairs location, the kids asked if we could do some kids stuff. Dylan headed for the bounce house, which only had a few kids in it. Rain waited in line for about ten minutes to get her face painted with a really cool red snake. The two things were right next to each other. In fact, all the kid-stuff was centrally located, which was convenient for kids who wanted different things.

I swear Dylan was in that bouncy house for twenty minutes by the time Rain had her face painted, and I dragged him out of there, and we went over to the local newspaper’s booth, where they were giving away little bottles of bubbles. Each kid got one, and we went back to the beach blanket to hear some great music.

I told Rain that she’d know just about every song they did, and she later said I was right. All their stuff is great… Boogie Shoes… Brick House… I Will Survive… Proud Mary… Turn The Beat Around… it was excellent. The sun was setting behind the stage, and it was increcible. It was still a little hot, but some people were up there dancing. We just watched for a while until Dylan decided he wanted to go back into the bouncy house.

Rain had pointed out that the little concession stand looked identical to the ones we see at the baseball fields behind our house, and I told her she was probably right. She had seen kidlets with sno cones, and asked me if she could get one. I said sure, and as she walked that way, I stuck my face up at the bounce house to ask the completely-sweaty Dylan if he’d like one too. He said yes, and I told him to get out of the bounce house. Thank goodness… I was starting to think he’d pass out from heat exhaustion in there. It is so hard to get the boy to wear shorts–all he ever wants to wear is jogging-style gym pants. Drives me nuts.

So the boy armed with a blue sno cone and the girl armed with a purple sno cone headed back to our designated blanket-and-chair place. You know, there’s three of us, so you’d think I’d have three lawn chairs… but I don’t. Darnit I need to get a third. But anyways, they sat in their chairs and ate their sno cones while I zoned on the beach blanket and listened to the great music. It was starting to get dark, and I broke out the glo-stick bracelets I had gotten for them.

You Dropped The Bomb On Me… Shake Your Groove Thing… Shook Me All Night Long… Sweet Home Alabama… the next thing we headed off to do was swing around on the playground. There weren’t a million kids there, but there was a few, and I was thankful for the glo-bracelets because it made the kids very easy to spot. Rain kept swinging upside down on the bars, saying, “Take my picture! Take my picture!” So I obliged, after digging around in my little bag to find my little red camera.

Back at the beach blanket, it was starting to get dark, and it was starting to get close to nine, and the band played on. There were more than twenty people up there dancing now, and Rain looked at me where I sat on the blanket. She pointed to the front of the stage. “You want to dance?” I hollered at her over the music. She nodded and smiled. I jumped at the chance.

Low low low… they played all kinds of currently-popular songs, and I was so happy to be dancing with her. I can’t remember ever dancing with her in public at a place like this before. I asked Dylan, but he just wanted to sit in the lawn chair, which was fine–it was just a few feet away from us. My little girl growing up, I thought, as I watched her dance with a smile on her face.

I’m so happy for every moment I have with them. I love to see them happy, see them having fun, and… well, I love to dance with them.

Click this link to hear the song.
This song came out when my Rain Baby was just that–a baby. When I first heard it, I swear, I thought… this is my Rain’s song. I went out and bought the CD. I couldn’t find a single… so I have the entire CD, still in the plastic, sitting in a keepsake box for the kids. There’s also baby shirts, hospital bracelets, and other trinkets for the kids to have when they’re grown. Whenever this song comes on, it makes me want to cry. I love my Rain Baby… and I’m reminded every time I see her that she’s not very much of a baby anymore, though she will always be my baby in my heart.