Goodbye Dear Rug

Today I lost my rug. Ian and I opened our storage unit only to find a pipe going thru the top of the unit leaked, burning holes in my beautiful Pottery Barn rug (circa 2002) and leaving some gnarly rust stains on my beautiful Pottery Barn couch (oh how I miss that discount!). And the storage company, being the nice people that they are, told us it wasn't their problem. As I was complaining about this in the office, a guy in there said, "Hey, there is a pipe running thru my unit as well." Well man, I have some advice for you, move it while you can; otherwise the storage company will be telling you tough luck as well! Of course, they haven't seen or heard the last from Jessica on this one! Let the war on the storage company begin...drum roll please...

Travel Nightmare

What do you do when you live the worst day of your life? Blog about it, of course! After I tell you this story, you will probably realize my life has been extremely well up until this point! Now, to the story…

My story begins when we arrive at Heathrow to discover our flight from Heathrow to Calgary has been delayed by three hours. We talked to an agent there about rescheduling the second leg of our journey (from Calgary to San Francisco) for a later time. They told us we would be helped with this once we arrive in Calgary. They also told us to talk to the flight attendants when we were about an hour away from Calgary and they could help us. Now fast forward to us being on the flight. The take off was fine and immediately they started serving a meal, which is totally usual. When the flight attendants were about done serving the meal, we hit turbulence and the pilot came on saying that all the flight attendants needed to be seated and the meal service ended. After this, we endured three hours of hell. This translates into three hours of turbulence, complete with much vomiting (not on mine or Ian’s part, but most of the other passengers) and the isles cluttered with our meal that was still in front of us. If anyone tried to get out of their seats, they immediately yelled over the loudspeaker for everyone to remain seated. At one point, they actually announced that once we ran out of barf bags, we were to use the bags our blankets came in. Are you kidding me?!? What was quite weird to me was how calm everyone remained throughout this experience. You could here the occasional crying and tons of vomiting, but no one was speaking or being hysterical. You may think I am being a little dramatic, but I kind of thought our plane wasn’t going to make it. I have never been through anything like this and neither had the flight attendants (which is always reassuring). Anyway, the turbulence finally ended and the cabin got semi cleaned up. The smell of vomit never left throughout the entire flight. I think they are going to have to steam clean that plane!

Now fast forward to about an hour before our plane is supposed to land…which it is now due to land 30 minutes before our connection departs (let me remind you that we originally gave ourselves 4 hours between flights). Ian asks the flight attendant about our connection, who gets annoyed with him for asking and lets him know that many people are in the same situation as us, and we will just have to wait until we land to deal with it. Just before we land, we are told an agent of Air Canada (I say the name so you NEVER fly with them after my awful experience) will meet us at the gate to help up. We land, get off the plane, and there is no agent in sight. So we proceed thru passport control and wait for our baggage. At baggage claim, we are told there will be an agent just outside of customs to help us. Of course, we exit out of customs and there once again is no agent in sight. Seeing on the departures board that our flight has already taken off, we get into a line that is helping people who missed their transfers. We know there is another flight two and a half hours later and are hoping to be on it. We wait in this line for 45 minutes, only to be told that this desk only deals with domestic flights and we need to go upstairs. So, once again, we join another long line. At one point, we were told this was the wrong place for us to be helped and they tried to refer us to the place we had just come from, but we refused to move. Finally, we get to an Air Canada agent who is willing to help us, only to be told that not only was the flight out that night full, but all the flights on Christmas Eve were full as well. But, since Ian had already called AmEx travel, we knew there were first class seats still available for Christmas Eve. So, we mentioned this to the agent. She lets us know that since the flights tomorrow are on United (which is actually who our tickets were through), she couldn’t upgrade us. But, I convinced her to book the tickets for us and that we would go down and work it out with United. So, on to another line. At first I thought the agent at United wasn’t going to be helpful, but she quickly turned around. After I told her I refused to go on the long standby list for Christmas Eve, only to then be stuck in Canada for Christmas, she gave us the first class tickets, making us promise not to tell anyone else (you have to remember that many people on our flight from London missed the same connection we missed). So, happily we accepted the tickets. We once again called AmEx to get the details of our travel insurance (loving AmEx right now, by the way) and headed to a local hotel.

Now here I am right now, sitting in my first class seat to San Francisco, on a flight that took off almost two hours late. But, I know I will make it home for Christmas and that’s all that matters, right? I had to cancel my Christmas Eve shopping plans with my mom and don’t have any presents for anyone yet, but I am glad that I will soon be home and get to squeeze my family and tell them how much I love them and am glad to see them….awww, the joys of Christmas!

Airport Wonderment

Every time I am at the airport, I am surprised by the amount of people that have no clue how security works. Honestly, you have to be living under a rock to not have flown in the past seven years and know what security is like. But, there is always the person who acts this way, and I always happen to end up behind them in the security line!

This morning in Edinburgh, the "security line director" directed me to the longest security line of the bunch, putting me right behind a family with two small children. I was already frustrated just looking at them. I knew they were going to be a "problem". Ian told me to chill, and even though I was "chill" I was still amazed at the stupidity of this family. First, there are all the large signs that tell you what you need to take off/pull out and put through the x-ray machines. But, apparently this family has never flown before AND decided that the large yellow signs were worth ignoring. Anyway, they put their bags on the belt and tried to walk through the metal detector with their stroller, coats, cell phones, shoes and more. Needless to say, they were stopped and told what needs to go through the x-ray machine. They seemed semi annoyed by this. But what they need to realize is that everyone behind them in line was semi annoyed by their ignorance. I can understand forgetting taking off your belt or something, but come on, when you are standing in line watching every other person in front of you strip, you should realize you need to do the same. People need to catch up with the times and know the rules when they travel!

Seriously, have you seen anything more disgusting?!? I came across this in the store today. It's a British ham topped with apricots and prunes. You want in on this action? I can bring it home for you!!!

Nighttime in Edinburgh

It is starting to seem that I live my entire life under the cover of darkness. Seriously, the sun makes an appearance about 9am and is gone by 3:30pm! What type of day is that?!? It confuses me and makes me wonder what part of the day I should refer to as "night". It also demotivates me. It makes 4:30pm seem like 9:30pm. It throws off my eating schedule and makes taking a nap feel all too weird, as it feels like I am going to sleep for the night. Then, I think about how we are still headed to the darkest day of the year, so there is more to come...insert sad music and sniffing here...

But, then there are the lights...It's Edinburgh Christmas! The Christmas village invaded the city centre, complete with lights and fair rides. And, you just wouldn't get the full effect of the lights if it was sunny outside! Everyone comes out to the Christmas village. Most the time it is so crowed, you can't even walk. There is ice skating, ferris wheel riding, sausage eating, and more. And, lets not forget to mention the guy that sells roasted chestnuts...so iconic! Though, I must admit, the roasted chestnuts smell a lot better than they taste.

I guess there are pros and cons to every season. And, when the cons become too much, I turn on all the lights in the house and act like I am laying on a beach in California!!!

A Second Thanksgiving

Today Ian and I celebrated Thanksgiving for a second time this year. It wasn't so much a celebration, as a longing for that wonderful meal! When we celebrated Thanksgiving for the first time (you know, back when the rest of you did), we made a bunch of food, but we had a bunch of friends over as well. Because of this, there were no leftovers. And no leftovers meant we were both left with a craving for the leftovers. So, with my day off, I put together our second Thanksgiving of 2008. It was great, complete with turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, green bean casserole and pumpkin pie. I am beginning to think that Thanksgiving NEEDS to happen well more than once a year! As for those leftovers, I have plans. Not only are they going to make great lunches for Ian, I have visions of turkey soup in my head! Let's just hope I'm not over the turkey come Christmas!

Indoor Snowboarding

You know when you are growing up how you always dream of hitting the slopes...indoors! Yeah, me either! But, I think little children in Scotland thought that, judging by my co-workers. Today all the employees from my store went on an adventure; we went indoor snowboarding. To be honest, even though I was excited, I was nervous too. I haven't been snowboarding in a year and was afraid that I had somehow forgot how to. Thankfully I discovered I hadn't and never fell once...not that this was a challenge! Having never been to an indoor ski slope, I didn't know what to expect. The hill was quite small. It had a tow rope of sorts to get you to the top. This tow rope proved to be my nemesis. I fell off it. At this point you may be asking yourself, "how do you fall off a tow rope?" I don't know, but I managed to do it! So the girl that has mad snowboarding skills how horrible tow rope skills! And in case you wanted to know about the snowboarding conditions, the room is kept quite cold, but there isn't a breeze. The snow is good snow (not too icy or powdery). Now, putting my feet in rented boots, that was gross! The laces were wet when I got the boots and by the time I got them on, my hands stunk...think of all the germs that were on my hands! GROSS!

Now about hanging out with co-workers. I'm not going to lie, at times it can be hard to hang out with co-workers outside of work. All the sudden you aren't in the safety of your workplace, wearing your work stuff and talking about work. What do you talk about? How much of your life do you divulge? There's only so much small talk that can be done before you start acting like yourself and becoming all buddy-buddy with your co-worker. On a side note, pick and choose who you will become buddy-buddy with, as all co-workers are not friend-type of material! The funny part was that on the way home from the trip, all the girls ended up in the back of the mini-bus (these "mini-buses" are quite popular in Scotland; makes me laugh) being girls...talking about our men, babies (other people's, since non of us have our own) and celebrities. I guess wherever you go, girls will always be girls!

The Sleepless Night

Last night, I decided to go to bed early in an attempt to start my week off right. I fell asleep fast, which is unusual for me. Exactly an hour and fifty minutes after hitting the pillow, I woke up mid-nightmare. You ready for this? I dreamt that I stepped in dog poo! I HATE dog poo! I actually woke up with my heart pounding and covered in sweat. This was at 10:50pm. In case you can't do the math, that means I went to bed at 9pm. After calming down, I was hoping to go right back to sleep. Well that sleep didn't come until much later! The last time I looked at the clock was at 3:23am...and I had to get up at 4:30am! It was quite the long, stressful, sleepless night for me. All in all, I clocked about three hours sleep last night. I think the going to bed early thing backfired on me. I think my body actually thought I was taking a nap or something. That's the last time I try to do something "grown up" and get the right amount of sleep!