A Vacation Lost

I'm writing about this because I still feel so incredulous that this happened. Back in October I purchased tickets for the 3 of us to fly to Austin, Texas to visit friends. We were all so excited about this, and we were going to fly out today for a long weekend. I've never been to Austin, and was really curious as to what it is like.

But then in January Mike went to Alaska at the last minute, and there was no way he could do that AND take more time off from his job for the Texas trip in such a short span of time, so we decided we'd have to postpone the Texas trip. Big mistake. I called United Airlines, and tried to work with the agent to change our tickets to a month or so later. I was informed that there was a $150 change fee per ticket for this. What the heck!?! United was basically asking us to pay $450 in addition to the $650 we already paid for the tickets simply to change them to another weekend, with the exact same departure and arrival times. Uhh... no. We simply do not have $450 laying around to spend. And canceling the ticket? United gets to keep $150 per ticket as a service fee! And then if we want to use the remaining $67 per ticket, then we have to still pay $150 change fee, effectively slapping an additional $83 onto the price of whatever new ticket we buy. Is this twisted logic, or what? Whatever happened to paying the very reasonable price of $50 to change a ticket??

So thanks, United, for robbing us of a vacation and $650 hard-earned dollars. You suck. Flying the friendly skies? I think not.

The Vote!!

I hope everyone had a chance to vote today or prior to today. So important, especially for women. We have been casting our votes for less than 100 years!

I'm in Boise today. Flew in early this morning to work at a site all day and am staying overnight. This is my very first time being away from Jake overnight, and it is a very bittersweet feeling. I will be glad to get home.

So I'm in Boise for election night. The weird thing is that I have seen NO Obama or McCain signs/stickers anywhere in Boise. None. I even took an evening walk around the University of Boise campus and there was nothing. So strange, especially coming from Portland where there are Obama signs everywhere, and very rarely, McCain signs. Here in Boise I've seen a few signs for the local politicians, but none for the presidental race. You would think there wasn't even an election happening.

Anyway, so I'm alone in my hotel room with CNN on and just keeping an eye on the election. I have a chocolate-covered almond biscotti from the nice Italian restaurant that I went to, to soothe my tired and missing-Jake self.

Am looking forward to waking up tomorrow and knowing who is our new President.

Deodorant

It seems that soon I will begin traveling for my job again. I have been doing many things to prepare, including setting up nanny/day care for Jake.

Another thing I did was to buy some travel-size toiletries since I plan to carry-on my baggage the majority of the time. So everything has to be 3 ounces or less so the TSA can see them in the little plastic bag and declare that you are safe to fly.

Jake was fascinated with the travel-sized deodorant, I think he thought it was a kid-sized one for him!

I caught him pretending to put the deodorant on (the stuff hasn't yet been moved to the top). So I grabbed the camera and asked him to do it again. He flat out-refused to perform and got all shy looking at the camera. So I stood up and put down the camera. He started to do it again, so without him knowing I started recording again...



I laughed really hard at him catching me recording and trying to hide what he was doing.