I get done with last night’s post and the phone rings. Its Mindi, she needs me to come hang out at their place while she drives over to pick Cregan up at the ferry, because Ti-man was already asleep. Sure, no problem. I can put off packing and cleaning and work and everything else just that much longer.

I get there and Mindi leaves and I decide I’ll check into my flight via the 24-hour-prior online check-in they have now. Except it tells me I have no flights coming up. Which should have been wrong on two counts – I should have had a flight for today (or so I thought), as well as a round-trip home I booked for this Christmas when I was booking this flight. I was, naturally, more immediately concerned with the absence of an itinerary for this week’s trip home. I poke around some and realize that my departure was, in fact, a Thursday evening departure. Now I do remember poking at the idea of leaving on Thursday, but for the life of me, I remember actually booking a Friday flight. Well, it was Thursday. And the Thursday flight had departed about an hour before I logged on. So I wasn’t going home Thursday night.

I decided to watch some X-games and call them on my way home so I wouldn’t have to be on the phone when C&M got back. Dave Mirra was on, after all. He’s riding a 24-karat gold-plated bike this year. He’s earned it, but its still a little pretentious. He went over the bars when he came down a little too far forward on a pretty standard air.

Later, I’m on the phone with Jetblue. Sure, no prob, they’ll move me to Thursday. I just have to pay the $110 fare difference. Greeeeat. Expensive mistake. Then she comes back on and says I can go standby on Friday for free. I decide to gamble it. Its been a pit-of-your-stomach feeling for 24 hours, but I got here about 4 hours ahead of scheduled departure, which got me first standby spot in the system, so I should get one of the 2 open seats that are still available. I’m doubting anyone buys them between now and then, but I still have my fingers gingerly crossed (makes typing kind of difficult).

It will be a relief to finally get my butt in front of that little Direct TV screen. Oh and my flight’s delayed, so I really get to spend about 5 hours at the airport. Oh well. At least they have a free wifi hotspot. Which does not work. Can’t get a strong enough signal but I’ve got a primo spot in the advertised area, so I can’t imagine that moving would find me something better. That, and this place is BONKERS. Standing room only and there’s little of that left by now. People even just sitting and playing cards in the middle of the aisles – which doesn’t matter b/c its almost impossible to walk through them with this many people anyway.

Something happened somewhere today because every single flight is delayed big-time. The gate attendants are on the PA every 20 seconds giving very general late-arrival/departure updates. God bless these noise-cancelling headphones. They’re not the best – Sony’s and they’re not the in-ear buds, but over-ear phones – got an open-box deal at Best Buy a few years ago. Haven’t brought myself to pop for those $300 bad boys that go in like earplugs and apparently block out even the sound of your own breathing. I will some day, though. Right now I’m kind of holding out some vain hope that they might some day make phones that you can adjust the volume for each ear-bud separately, which would cater nicely to my hearing disability.

Did I mention totally freaking bonkers? The state of this airport right now? I just wonder if its like this in the other terminals for other airlines. I’m transferring all the mp3’s I put on my phone this week onto the laptop, so now I’ll have my favorite gig of music on 2 computers and my phone and I will be able to listen virtually anywhere but under water. As soon as the transfer is done and I can use my phone again (can’t use it when its USB’ing stuff), I’m going to call Sonja b/c I happen to know she’s going through Newark to visit her folks this weekend – so if she’s stuck in a similar situation there (I’m at JFK), we’ll officially know that “something” is up, but we’ll likely have no better idea what it is.

That’s all. I’m going to sit here and go crazy some more trying to get on the internet. The Chinese lady sitting next to me isn’t able to connect either, so its not just me. You can get a weak-to-medium signal from the Jetblue network, but for some reason it doesn’t give any real signal. There was a guy sitting here before me a few hours ago who said he got a signal after a while. ANNOYING.

(I’ll post this whenever I actually do get connected, be it here or somewhere in the golden state.)

(Update: I figured out how to get connected here in the airport, hours after I could have first used such knowledge. Its about time to go grovel in front of the desk for my standby seat - safe guess that I won't get an exit row seat on this flight. Sonja's airport was crazy too. So were some others I checked on. Weird. Have a nice weekend.)