First two of five: out to Indiana

Today begins my two week journey to parts old, new and old again. Since Southwest doesn't have any convenient non-stop flights to Chicago from AEFM (airport easy for me, read: flights after 9:00 am), I decided to start my day with a flight through Phoenix and fly "home" with Mom, eke out those last three hours in her Visit.

We successfully managed to suck at taking a self potrait of ourselves.

Mom and I hopped off the plane and wandered over to the gate of my next flight. We squeezed in another 15 minutes of girl-time together before my flight boarded. Since I'll be taking five flights over the next two weeks, with a total of 23 hours in the air, I brought along about 6" of magazines, three books (two of which Kris hasn't read so that he, too, can read them when I'm done with them), and two books on my iPod, including the Brothers Karamazov.

I hope to be all set for entertainment. We'll see.

Dad picked me up from the airport. To my surprise, and I think his, we beat our previous record of "arrival to complete annoyance" time, and set a spectacular new record: 15 minutes. We were arguing about banning smoking, with his logic making no sense (I later figured out he was using the guilt by association logic error), and I grew more and more and more frustrated, until I just lost it.

I threw a complete hissy fit and offered to just fly back home, since this trip was going to be full of arguments and I wanted to be with him, not spend the whole visit annoyed and pissed off at him.

I hadn't realized that I hadn't lost my hissy-fit touch. It's been so long since I threw one. Usually I just simmer. This one? Oh, this one was amazing. It was a fit of glory. It was so bad that people 40-50 meters away were shying away from my screaming onslaught. Dad seemed to curl in to himself.

When I was done, I have to say, my embarrassment ranked up in the top 10 worst moments of my life. I didn't need to lay into my dad that way. I spent the drive home apologizing.

We stayed away from politics for the ride home.

George and the newest addition to the family, Gracie, greeted us at the door. Nothing like the joy of two little dogs to put some happiness back into an arrival.