Sorry to disappoint
I was not in New York City during the blackout. So I don't have any cool blackout stories about getting trapped in an elevator or walking several hours home. I was in Wisconsin and watched it on the news like the rest of you. The only sign of the power outage when I got back to my apartment was the inch-thick layer of ice on the bottom of my freezer.
I think a temp was running air traffic control at LaGuardia last week
I rushed out of work at 5 p.m. on Wednesday to get to LaGuardia for my 8 p.m. flight. If I'd known how things were going to go, I would have stopped and had a really nice dinner. Instead I crammed myself and my bulky backpack onto a crowded 4 train. Even at rush hour, trains usually thin out at Grand Central. No such luck. Apparently everyone else was going to the Bronx, and I had to fight my way out at 125th Street. Then I spent an hour on a bus moving at a crawl through rush hour traffic. I was between a screaming baby and a man with these really frightening metal attachments on his luggage.
I got to the airport at 6:45. Plenty of time to go through self check-in, eat a slice of pizza and get on my plane. When I checked in, I found out my flight had been delayed half an hour. I wasn't concerned. I could still make the 10 o'clock bus to Rockford if I rushed, and if not there was an 11 o'clock too. But then a little before 8:30 my flight was delayed until 8:45. Then at 8:45, it was delayed until 9:30. The problem was that there was a plane at the gate that they couldn't get pushed away. They finally got that solved, but it still to a long time for our plane to get to the gate.
At 9:35 we finally started to board the plane. Hooray! But after they'd boarded half the plane, the man working at the desk answered the phone, put his hand to his forehead and shook his head. All I could make out was "stop boarding." We all exchanged he-better-mean-temporarily looks. He went onto the plane, came back and announced that our plane had been put out of service after it landed (40 minutes ago!) but they were going to find us another plane. Five minutes later he told us to switch to gate D6. (Earlier in this mess we'd been switched from D4 to D8.) The people working the desk at D6 looked confused when we all herded over. They actually asked us what flight we were there for. Isn't it their job to know these things? Ten minutes later they sent us back to D8. I spent the next hour waiting for a plane to arrive at the gate. Our flight kept disappearing off the departures board. It's unsettling to look up and see the next flight to Chicago at 6 am. By this time there was no way I would make the 11 o'clock bus to Rockford so I had to call my parents and ask them to drive to O'Hare. I promised to call once we really boarded a plane so they would know when to leave. We finally started boarding a plane at 10:45. The man at the desk started rushing us and telling us to take our seats immediately because our crew went illegal at 11 so we had to be off the ground before that. I wasn't quite sure what this meant, but by this point I just had to laugh at it all. We weren't off the ground by 11, but luckily our crew was rebellous and took off anyway. I finally arrived in Belvidere at 1:30 in the morning, central time.
Going to the chapel
1. I'm in love with a bridal shop owner and her seamstress. First thing Thursday morning I had to go in for an emergency alteration appointment. My dress was super big on me for several reasons. 1) A debacle involving David's Bridal and having to reorder different dresses from another store six weeks before the wedding. It's hard to go in for a fitting when you're a thousand miles away. 2) I have a weird body shape and was in between three sizes (how is that possible?), and they had to go with my waist size even though it meant everything else would be too big. 3) My living-a-mile-from-the-subway-on-the-fifth-floor-of-a-building-with-no-elevator weight loss plan. The shop owner let me try on the floor sample dress, which was several sizes smaller, and it fit almost perfectly so she just let me trade dresses. Then all the seamstress had to do was a little tailoring and the hem. Even better she finished it in two and a half hours so I could take it with me when I left for Milwaukee (technically, Brookfield) instead of having my parents deliver it the morning of the wedding. Hooray!
2. We broke some rules with the bachelorette/bachelor parties. I'm pretty sure the groom, his brother and the two best men aren't supposed to be at the bachelorette party. But it made Lizz happy and ended up being a really good time. (Plus the boys paid for some of our drinks.)
3. I tied lots and lots of bows on Friday. Why do weddings involve so much ribbon?
4. We had our hair done bright and early at Harry Nick and Friends Salon. A salon with a very unfortunate name, where coincidentally, our very own Brookfield superstar has gotten his hair cut.
5. Apparently being "train bitch" is somewhere in the maid of honor job description. I spent a lot of Saturday morning following Lizz around the botanical gardens and carrying the back of her dress and then arranging it artfully for photos.
6. After pictures, our limo stopped at McDonalds for cheeseburgers on the way to the church.
Things that suck
1. Being the single maid of honor and having the bride and groom try to set you up with the single best man.
2. Having the entire bridal party in on it too.
3. Actually hitting it off with said best man and proving your friends right.
4. Knowing he lives in Kansas. Kansas.
5. Puking all over yourself while sitting next to him in a car. (Last I checked, so not sexy.)
More trouble with LaGuardia, and it wasn't even because of the blackout
My trip back to New York sucked. We boarded the plane on time but then had to sit at the gate for half an hour while the ground crew fixed a door they'd bent loading the luggage. We taxied out to the runway, but then the pilot made an announcement. "I've got good news and bad news. The good news is that we're all here on the plane together." When that's the good news, you know you're in trouble. All flights to New York had been grounded because of a thunderstorm there, so we sat on the runway for an hour. They tried to make up for the wait with an extra glass of water and a few re-runs of Everybody Loves Raymond. We finally took off and made it to LaGuardia by 11:30, but then we had to sit on the runway there because of all the traffic backed up at the gate. I finally got home at 1 a.m. and had to wake up for work at 7. Ugh, sometimes I hate being an "adult."
Empty
My apartment's almost completely empty at the moment. It's kind of creepy. My roommate moved out Tuesday morning, my new roommate doesn't move in until Labor Day, and my parents aren't bringing the rest of my furniture until the week after that. So right now it's just me, my bed, a futon my roommate didn't want and a small bookshelf. I don't even have any dishes. It looks vaguely like I've been robbed.
Random Work News
1. Our British publisher became a Lord about a month ago. They sent him the official scroll in one of those poster tubes. From now on I will refer to him as Lord Phil. I really wish I could call him that in person.
2. Our new reporter was this summer's Justin Marciniak at the AdWeek group.
3. Our editor-in-chief took the two new girls and our director bosses out to lunch on Tuesday. The restaurant gave us free caviar from some mysterious reason.
4. I went out for drinks with some other staffers last night after work and didn't get home until 11 p.m. One swanky bar with a good happy hour and a dive bar across the street with cheap beer make for a quality evening.
I was not in New York City during the blackout. So I don't have any cool blackout stories about getting trapped in an elevator or walking several hours home. I was in Wisconsin and watched it on the news like the rest of you. The only sign of the power outage when I got back to my apartment was the inch-thick layer of ice on the bottom of my freezer.
I think a temp was running air traffic control at LaGuardia last week
I rushed out of work at 5 p.m. on Wednesday to get to LaGuardia for my 8 p.m. flight. If I'd known how things were going to go, I would have stopped and had a really nice dinner. Instead I crammed myself and my bulky backpack onto a crowded 4 train. Even at rush hour, trains usually thin out at Grand Central. No such luck. Apparently everyone else was going to the Bronx, and I had to fight my way out at 125th Street. Then I spent an hour on a bus moving at a crawl through rush hour traffic. I was between a screaming baby and a man with these really frightening metal attachments on his luggage.
I got to the airport at 6:45. Plenty of time to go through self check-in, eat a slice of pizza and get on my plane. When I checked in, I found out my flight had been delayed half an hour. I wasn't concerned. I could still make the 10 o'clock bus to Rockford if I rushed, and if not there was an 11 o'clock too. But then a little before 8:30 my flight was delayed until 8:45. Then at 8:45, it was delayed until 9:30. The problem was that there was a plane at the gate that they couldn't get pushed away. They finally got that solved, but it still to a long time for our plane to get to the gate.
At 9:35 we finally started to board the plane. Hooray! But after they'd boarded half the plane, the man working at the desk answered the phone, put his hand to his forehead and shook his head. All I could make out was "stop boarding." We all exchanged he-better-mean-temporarily looks. He went onto the plane, came back and announced that our plane had been put out of service after it landed (40 minutes ago!) but they were going to find us another plane. Five minutes later he told us to switch to gate D6. (Earlier in this mess we'd been switched from D4 to D8.) The people working the desk at D6 looked confused when we all herded over. They actually asked us what flight we were there for. Isn't it their job to know these things? Ten minutes later they sent us back to D8. I spent the next hour waiting for a plane to arrive at the gate. Our flight kept disappearing off the departures board. It's unsettling to look up and see the next flight to Chicago at 6 am. By this time there was no way I would make the 11 o'clock bus to Rockford so I had to call my parents and ask them to drive to O'Hare. I promised to call once we really boarded a plane so they would know when to leave. We finally started boarding a plane at 10:45. The man at the desk started rushing us and telling us to take our seats immediately because our crew went illegal at 11 so we had to be off the ground before that. I wasn't quite sure what this meant, but by this point I just had to laugh at it all. We weren't off the ground by 11, but luckily our crew was rebellous and took off anyway. I finally arrived in Belvidere at 1:30 in the morning, central time.
Going to the chapel
1. I'm in love with a bridal shop owner and her seamstress. First thing Thursday morning I had to go in for an emergency alteration appointment. My dress was super big on me for several reasons. 1) A debacle involving David's Bridal and having to reorder different dresses from another store six weeks before the wedding. It's hard to go in for a fitting when you're a thousand miles away. 2) I have a weird body shape and was in between three sizes (how is that possible?), and they had to go with my waist size even though it meant everything else would be too big. 3) My living-a-mile-from-the-subway-on-the-fifth-floor-of-a-building-with-no-elevator weight loss plan. The shop owner let me try on the floor sample dress, which was several sizes smaller, and it fit almost perfectly so she just let me trade dresses. Then all the seamstress had to do was a little tailoring and the hem. Even better she finished it in two and a half hours so I could take it with me when I left for Milwaukee (technically, Brookfield) instead of having my parents deliver it the morning of the wedding. Hooray!
2. We broke some rules with the bachelorette/bachelor parties. I'm pretty sure the groom, his brother and the two best men aren't supposed to be at the bachelorette party. But it made Lizz happy and ended up being a really good time. (Plus the boys paid for some of our drinks.)
3. I tied lots and lots of bows on Friday. Why do weddings involve so much ribbon?
4. We had our hair done bright and early at Harry Nick and Friends Salon. A salon with a very unfortunate name, where coincidentally, our very own Brookfield superstar has gotten his hair cut.
5. Apparently being "train bitch" is somewhere in the maid of honor job description. I spent a lot of Saturday morning following Lizz around the botanical gardens and carrying the back of her dress and then arranging it artfully for photos.
6. After pictures, our limo stopped at McDonalds for cheeseburgers on the way to the church.
Things that suck
1. Being the single maid of honor and having the bride and groom try to set you up with the single best man.
2. Having the entire bridal party in on it too.
3. Actually hitting it off with said best man and proving your friends right.
4. Knowing he lives in Kansas. Kansas.
5. Puking all over yourself while sitting next to him in a car. (Last I checked, so not sexy.)
More trouble with LaGuardia, and it wasn't even because of the blackout
My trip back to New York sucked. We boarded the plane on time but then had to sit at the gate for half an hour while the ground crew fixed a door they'd bent loading the luggage. We taxied out to the runway, but then the pilot made an announcement. "I've got good news and bad news. The good news is that we're all here on the plane together." When that's the good news, you know you're in trouble. All flights to New York had been grounded because of a thunderstorm there, so we sat on the runway for an hour. They tried to make up for the wait with an extra glass of water and a few re-runs of Everybody Loves Raymond. We finally took off and made it to LaGuardia by 11:30, but then we had to sit on the runway there because of all the traffic backed up at the gate. I finally got home at 1 a.m. and had to wake up for work at 7. Ugh, sometimes I hate being an "adult."
Empty
My apartment's almost completely empty at the moment. It's kind of creepy. My roommate moved out Tuesday morning, my new roommate doesn't move in until Labor Day, and my parents aren't bringing the rest of my furniture until the week after that. So right now it's just me, my bed, a futon my roommate didn't want and a small bookshelf. I don't even have any dishes. It looks vaguely like I've been robbed.
Random Work News
1. Our British publisher became a Lord about a month ago. They sent him the official scroll in one of those poster tubes. From now on I will refer to him as Lord Phil. I really wish I could call him that in person.
2. Our new reporter was this summer's Justin Marciniak at the AdWeek group.
3. Our editor-in-chief took the two new girls and our director bosses out to lunch on Tuesday. The restaurant gave us free caviar from some mysterious reason.
4. I went out for drinks with some other staffers last night after work and didn't get home until 11 p.m. One swanky bar with a good happy hour and a dive bar across the street with cheap beer make for a quality evening.
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