Red-eye, Shmed-eye

My trip to Washington was great. I swear, everything went right. On Sunday I did a little shopping—I just can't go to Bellevue without visiting Nordstrom Rack—and had more good luck. I'd been carrying around this teeny bottle of Bath & Body Works hand cream in my purse for a few months. I must've gotten it from one of the motels I stayed in this year, probably in Boston. Anyway, I loved the scent so much that I've wanted to buy some for myself. It's called Cool Citrus Basil.

But I wasn't having any luck. In early December, I checked for it at the Bath & Body Works at South Street Seaport in lower Manhattan. No go. "Come back December 27th," the girl there told me. The first week of January I checked for this lotion at the mall at Columbia Town Center, here in Maryland. The girl there said that they did have some recently. She helped me sift through the baskets full of lotions, to no avail. Finally, at Factoria Mall in Bellevue (on the other side of the country), I found it! I bought two large bottles of the cream and one bottle of the splash. I wish I'd bought a Lotto ticket that day—everything was going right.

I had lunch at the Cheesecake Factory at Bellevue Square, (my old stomping ground), with my good friend Tom. Tom is my cat Martin's former adopter. I've mentioned him before—Tom was the only one (besides Paul and Janet, of course) who visited me in the hospital when I had my disc replacement surgery in 2005. He and I were sys admins at Homegrocer.com back in the dot-com days. I adopted Martin from Tom in the fall of 2002, long after the fall of the Peach.

Speaking of Martin, he's got this new habit that's keeping me up at night. He does that kneading thing that most cats do, in my hair and on my neck. Four years I had Martin and he never did that. At first it was sweet and cute. I Googled "cats kneading" and found out that this is a sign of contentment. That made me happy. At the time.

But now, after a few weeks of this instant middle-of-the-night head massaging going on, it's driving me crazy. I'm not getting my REM sleep. Every time Martin gets up from bed to get water or what-have-you, he comes back to bed and wakes me up with his kneading. All morning long he carries on this behavior. I'm not quite sure what to do about that.

Which brings us to the red-eye business. I need my sleep—not unlike everyone else. . . except that I do best on 8-9 hours of sleep these days. The truth is, I don't function well on anything less than six hours. (I'm middle-aged; I can't help it.) So, on Monday night when I left Seattle on the 11:42pm red-eye, I was hoping that I could sleep on the plane and possibly even go to work for at least a few hours Tuesday.

Let me tell you, that was my first—and last—red-eye flight.

I normally can't sleep on a plane, but I had high hopes for this flight in light of the fact that 11:42pm Pacific time is really 2:42am my time. I was exhausted from a day of business meetings, and the entire row of seats I was in was empty. Not a soul. As I walked back to my seat in the second row from the back of the plane, I noticed that all the children on this flight were near the front of the plane and that there was just one stewardess in the row behind me. Good, I thought, no screaming kids near my row, for once. I'll have some peace.

It was all quiet and dark back there. The plane pulled away from the gate a full 10 minutes early—something that has never happened to me on any flight ever! So things were still going my way. Then the pilot announced that our flight time would only be 4:10, about 30 minutes quicker due to a nice tailwind.

I settled down against my pillow, put in my ear plugs, and covered myself with a blanket. Just as I was relaxing in the complete darkness, the flight attendant in the row behind me turned on her overhead reading light. I was like a deer in the headlights. Talk about bright reading lights! This one lit up my whole row too. Drat, I thought.

After an hour or so, I finally fell asleep. I was stretched out on the three seats on my side of the aisle. The seats opposite me were all empty. At some point I was awakened by a kid talking animatedly—and very loudly too. Despite my ear plugs I could hear him rattling on about something. I was groggy. The kid kept on. Where was that noisy kid?

I finally sat up and looked at my watch—it was 5:30am. Still an hour and a half to go. Then I saw the kid. His dad had left their assigned seats and brought his loud 3-year-old son to the formerly peaceful row that I was sitting in. He set the kid up with Sponge Bob on a portable DVD player over by the window. But he never once told the kid to shut up. This little boy carried on at the top of his lungs for the entire rest of the flight. No such thing as an "inside voice" for this one. And Daddy just leaned back and shut his eyes.

So, why did Dad move him back there? To get him away from the other people up front so as not to bother them? What about us quiet, kid-free folks minding our own business in our assigned seats at the back of the plane? Why torture us? What are we, chopped liver? Not to mention, how can you possibly sit there and ignore the kid's unbearable decibel level? Are you completely oblivious that there are 100 people in the near vicinity that are trying to sleep?

See, this is what I don't get about parents like this guy. It's as if they can't hear their own kids when they're out in public. Worse, they let them get away with everything. Red-eye Kid kept carrying on about "I don't wanna wear a seatbelt!" So he didn't. Then, when we landed (and I was already grumpy from being kept up by this brat), the little kid jumped all over the seats next to his dad yelling, "Daddy, get up, we have to get out!" Over and over and over again. Obviously, the aisle was blocked with us passengers trying in vain to escape Red-Eye Kid's obnoxious mouth, so Daddy had nowhere to go. But the longer it took for folks to disembark, the more this kid demanded that his father get up.

Aaaaaagh! I wanted to duct-tape the boy's mouth shut. The guy in front of me in line (an extremely young soldier in dress blues with the shiniest shoes I've ever seen) kept smiling down at the kid like he was cute or something.

NOT cute! There was nothing cute about this.

The drive home from Dulles was an hour and 15 minutes. Since it was 7:30am when I left the airport in the freezing 30-degree cold, there was no way I was going to take the Capitol Beltway to I-95 to get home in the morning rush-hour heading toward D.C. It would've been total gridlock. So I went the scenic route, west and then north to Frederick and then east. It was 20 miles longer, but it probably would've taken me closer to 2 hours to get around the beltway and up to Ellicott City.

I was tired. I went straight to bed and slept for 4-5 hours (when Martin wasn't kneading my head). I got up but was still out of it. After eating and watching a re-run of the most of the fourth quarter of the Seattle-Dallas game that I'd accidentally recorded and an episode of Law & Order, I went back to bed at 7:00pm and stayed there until morning.

And it was back to work yesterday. Ugh. The funny thing is, I felt like I was leaving home when I left Seattle to return to MD—not coming home. It's cold here. It was 72 degrees on Saturday when I left the east coast, and 30 degrees when I came back Tuesday.

One of these days I'll be back in the Pacific Northwest. That's where my heart is, that's where several of my closest friends are, and I'm pretty sure that's where I belong.