Update... Oct 10, 2005

Good afternoon everyone!!!

Well, I have just recently risen from the ashes like the phoenix. It has been an EXTREMELY long couple of weeks, hence my sudden cease and desist of my updates. But I am back now and so here we go…

Ok, so the last two weeks haven’t been nearly as awe inspiring as I would have liked them to be, sort of like a sequel to “Napleon Dynamite”… you are watching it, but are you really paying attention? Well, I haven’t really been paying attention as my own life plays out before my eyes, even though I am in every scene I still don’t seem to have a clue as to what is going on.


On to Toronto! Ok, so anyone who says business travel is great and you get to see a lot of neat places and what not, didn’t work here. I got picked up by my fellow travelers on Sunday at 11:30am in order to make a 1:30pm flight. This seemed like it was going to be an easy thing to pull off. Well, we were just at Grapevine Mills mall, so close to the airport and it was noon. Lookin’ good. Wade (my mgr) decides that he is hungry and that we need to stop and find a Taco Bell. This is something that takes us gallivanting all around the area looking for a Taco Bell which apparently did not exist. We end up getting to the airport, go to North Express Parking only to find out that it is full. Ok, so we go to South Express Parking and wait forever before the bus picks us up. Meanwhile we are waiting for the bus and watching the two lesbians that will be on the bus with us making out in the parking lot. This is making out, there is kissing and petting and… well, you get the point. So, I was a little uncomfortable sitting across from them on the bus. They were no longer making out, but once you have been watching the show for 15 minutes, it is hard to just let it all go. We get to the terminal, I race to the ticketing counter to get my boarding pass, and the little man says that I cant check my bags but I can get my boarding pass and make a run for it. Great, I am equal to the task, and this will be the second time in a row I have had to make a run for a flight, but I was successful before… so I am confident. This is a piece of cake. Wade walks up to get his boarding pass, toting behind him the biggest suitcase known to mankind. If I was going to Antarctica and could only take one bag, this would be it people. You could ship a small family of four from Cuba to the US in one of these bags if you really had to. The gentleman behind the counter informs Wade that he cant check that bag, and that he cant make it through security with that bag, which means he cant make the flight. So, we all decide to stay together and we all catch the next flight. This flight is a mere six hours away. This is not exactly good news. We all hunker down and start waiting. Finally 7 o’clock comes around and we are on our way… after flight for 3 hours we get in a little after 11pm Toronto time. We finally get our rental car, and we were waiting on by the most unfriendly man in the world. He is rude, unhappy, dresses in polyester, and lives in Toronto working the National Rental Car desk. This is where he is folks, look him up or avoid him the choice is yours. After much grumbling and griping he finally gets us a mini-van, now we are cool. We finally get to the hotel, check-in and I get into the hotel room and look at the clock when I set my bags down. It is 1:12am and I have to be downstairs fresh as a daisy at 8am… and I really needed some sleep.

The week rolled on pretty frantically, everyday was a long day, everyday was a full day, everyday started early and ended late. By the end we had “exceeded expectations” and the pressure was off just a little bit. The four of us decide to go to Niagra Falls on Thursday night. This was good news for me, I was more than happy to go see the falls, because I had never seen them, and the Canada side is supposed to be the good side, and boy howdy… it was!!! They were beautiful and well worth the hours of driving to get there. We were walking around looking at the falls when I saw something out of the corner of my eye. It was a raccoon, and he was HUGE. This thing was as big as a beaver, maybe bigger. He was running to a garbage can (go figure) and I though nothing of it… until I turned as saw that he had two friends lurking close by. One of the friends broke for the garbage cans, then other came toward me. I immediately started screaming and running, it was something straight out of a “Godzilla” movie. I thought it was the end, “Raccoon-zilla” was after me and I was running as fast as I could. I catch up to Wade and I think I scared the heck out of him, and he looks at Suresh who is standing near I was. Wade asked him, “What is it?” and Suresh who looks remarkably unalarmed, looked at him, and said “I don’t know man, some sort of animal.” Now, everyone is making fun of me. I truly think raccoons are dangerous, and really scary looking. They have teeth and little hands, and rabies. They scare me. That is all I have to say about that. I have not woken up screaming from this, but it is possible that I could have been severely scarred. Friday was the next day, and we all left the office around 2pm, and headed for home. It was just about 9:30 when I walked in my house and I was so glad to be home, to be back in my bed and to relax.


That is all for me for now… need to try and get some work done, but wanted to catch everyone up.

Martha