February 15, 2007

Crossing Paths in Newburgh, N.Y.

Earl and I are spending the night outside of Newburgh, N.Y. He has business meetings in the morning and then from here we’ll make the hour or so trek to our hotel in Manhattan. Tomorrow night we have tickets to “The Apple Tree” starring Kristin Chenoweth.

My sister has been trying to get home from Moscow since early Wednesday morning. She landed at JFK yesterday, where her plane sat on the runway for four hours because they had no place to put her plane. She was not amused. For the next thirty hours, each and every flight upstate was canceled. She had no way to get out of JFK. There were no hotel rooms available. She ended up sleeping for ten minutes on the floor next to an arcade machine until a woman next to her screamed because a mouse had run across the floor. So she wandered terminal four awaiting a flight today.

They were all canceled as well.

She finally rented a car and armed with no sleep for the previous 36 hours and a brother who is as accurate as Rand McNally, I talked her from JFK to the New York State Thruway. I later suggested she stop for the night and finish the trip tomorrow morning. So she’s staying in the same hotel as us tonight. Her luggage is somewhere between JFK and Anchorage, so she grabbed some night clothes at the store and hung out with us for a bit. We’re all having breakfast in the morning before we continue our trips in opposite directions.

This is certainly a nice way to kick off our weekend.

Let’s go somewhere else.

After yesterday’s snow day, today has been a relatively normal day. The National Weather Service says that about 31 inches of snow fell over the past 48 hours. It seems like I’ve moved twice as much out of the driveway. I resisted the urge to fight back to the snowplow driver by pelting him with his own rocks and sand when he drove by and nearly buried me in a snowdrift. Those guys work hard and I appreciate what they do, but he still made me mad.

Earl has a meeting out of town tomorrow so I’ve decided to tag along. We’re going to the lovely city of Newburgh tonight and then we’re going to spend the weekend in Manhattan.

We figured it was a great way to spend the post-Valentine’s Day weekend. I’m hoping it’ll be warmer down there.