Monday, April 30, 2007

Home Again, Home Again, Jiggety-Jig

Mike and I flew back to LA yesterday. It was a very long day. Mike's day started at about 3:30 a.m. when the nurses were not able to successfully draw blood for his morning bloodwork and they managed to both wake him up and piss him off. Then he had the incredibly painful removal of the drain that has been in his abdomen since the surgery last Sunday. He called and woke me up at about 7:00 a.m. to vent about the pain and the lack of sleep.

Late-morning we managed to get him checked out of the hospital and picked up his prescriptions at Walgreen's (the whole nationwide pharmacy chain thing is really great, by the way). We went to my sister's house for lunch and in order to allow him to rest up a bit before our evening flight back home.

Aside: I had a really good visit with my family this trip. I've sort of put in place a 3 day rule for family visits, so when the trip changed from a 3 day excursion to a 10 day adventure, I was a bit concerned, but I had a great time overall visiting with mom and my sister and her daughters (quite possibly the cutest nieces in the entire world, but I'm not biased). Maybe our family unit isn't perfect still, but we've made a lot of progress in the last few months. And my sister was very welcoming and nice to Mike.

We left for the airport really early so that we wouldn't need to hurry. It was a good thing, since we ended up spending about a half hour talking to the good folks at Hertz about what we were going to end up paying for the car (the phone operator when I called to extend the reservation did her best to royally screw us and we ended up talking a $730 bill upon return down to a $330 bill for the 10 days' use of the car). Thanks to the kind folks working the counter at Hertz yesterday. They went out of their way to help us out, after seeing the state that Mike was in at that point.

The flight and airport scenes worked out okay and after about 4-5 hours of travel (including drives to and from the airport), I got Mike home and he spent some quality time with our very lonely, very needy cat. Mission accomplished.

Then I turned around and went to the concert that we had tickets for last night. Typically I would have bagged the show, but it was a small, not-very-publicized show by one of my favorite acts (Travis) a full 3 years since their last tour. They were in town for Coachella and they did an add-on show at the Henry Fonda Theater in Hollywood. Sure, they'll be touring again this summer to promote their upcoming album, but this is exactly the sort of show that makes the LA music scene so cool, and I really didn't want to miss it. The show was pretty good (the not-so-great acoustics and my general fatigue are the only things that kept it from receiving a "Phenomenal" rating from me). They played some of my old favorites and the new stuff that they threw in was all pretty catchy and fun. I'm glad I went, but by the time it ended, I was so incredibly happy to head home to sleep in my own bed once again.

Welcome home.

2 comments:

gbc said...

Good to hear that your sister was welcoming and everything, especially since you were stuck there for over a week.

Burt Likko said...

Glad to hear Mike's okay and things have worked out. You probably have a stack of work on your desk taller than the central courthouse.