Like the song says, "oh what a night". As I reflect on the last 24 hours of my life,
all I can say is, “I made it”. Let me
start this from the beginning. I should
have taken the events throughout the day as an omen, giving signs to what the
day would hold. My first omen, I had
gotten a new iPhone, and thought I knew how to work it, and the alarm. Come to find out, I don’t. I some how had a do not disturb on or something
like that, and well I slept through my alarm.
Luckily Dan had to wake up for work, so his alarm got me going. The only
down fall to this was I did not have time to shower. This was the second omen. I don’t
drink coffee or anything with a lot of caffeine. Do to that, my morning shower is like my jump
start to my day, with out it, I am useless.
At this time, I am ready to head out to the school. This is when I realized
I don’t know what I did with my charger for my lap top, third omen. I have stayed in multiple states in the last
2 and a half weeks, New Orleans makes the fourth state, so in my head I have no
clue where anything is. I start to panic thinking I may have left it in Georgia
because that was the last place I had used it.
Since I had been home, I had been using the desk top for everything so
had no need for a charger. Luckily Dan
always takes care of me and informed me it was in his bag. THANK GOD, because that would have made this
class extremel hard. Finally, I was
ready to go start my day.
Omen number four, as I venture out to start my day, I stepped in a fresh pile
of dog doodoo that I was
too busy to pick up before. What makes this even more depressing, it was
on white snow. The contrast in the coloring should have made it super easy to
seed. I just needed to open my eyes.
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| My drive to school |
Once I got into the car is when omen five, six, and seven occurred. When I went to start my car, it was so cold, and
my car has a push button ignition, and it wasn’t wanting to start. It literally made that weird noise that cars
make when you start them for like a whole minute before it finally started. Then I realized I had no gas to make it to Peoria,
and had to pump gas in negative 14-degree weather. I consider this an omen because I hate the
cold and Dan usually fills my car up for me, so I don’t have to worry about
it. Then once I was about to enter into Peoria,
there was a wreck on the bridge, and they had closed off one of the two lanes
to clean up. Due to this I was stuck
sitting in traffic for close to 40 minutes, making me late for my first day of
class.
I finally made it to the school. This
is where the seventh omen comes into play.
We had to give little presentations on our blogs to the class. When I had to speak I completely froze, and preceded
to stumble over every word I said. Which
is kind of normal for me, but usually nothing that extreme. Which I find it odd
that I cram up when I give presentations, because I am usually loud and love
attention. What can I say, I am a
walking contradiction?
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| Photo provided by Verizon |
After class, I had so much to do before having to be at the train station at
8:30pm. This was omen number eight. I had to run to my mom’s house to help her
set up her new phone. After driving all
the way to her house before heading back to Bloomington to finish my own travel
preparations, the sim card that Verizon ensured me would be at her house by
10:30 AM was not there. Luckily, they
refunded me my $13 that I paid for over night shipping. The issue now is, my mom is still without a phone,
and I can’t rely on her doing it herself, because she is anything but tech savvy.
After I got all that handled and made it home, I had only about an hour and
a half to finish gathering and packing for my trip. Luckily most of my necessities were already
gathered from previous trips. I only had
to worry about making sure I had all my chargers, toiletries, and my sanity. Then I got to experience the highlight of my day. I finally got to take a nice hot shower to
relax and prepare myself for this adventure.
Omen number nine, the train station.
I arrived right on time, I was even like eight minutes early. At
this point in time everything was on track. As a class we were gathered and ready to go,
and then it happened. The first
announcement, informing us that our train was running about an hour behind
schedule. Which okay, it’s a train, in
my experience, it is kind of something to expect. Then it happened, again, and then again. After waiting in the train station for approximately
five hours, it had finally arrived. The
attendant paged to have us all line up and to prepare to load. As we
started making our way out to the train in the freezing cold, we were stopped, and told to go back
inside. They then had us wait for about
30-40 min before they allowed us to board.
Once on bored, I was finally able to sprawl out, well kind of. I was able to utilize the space I had available. To my surprise I got about 4 hours of sleep,
and that my friends brings us up to now!
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| My Baggage |
