It’s a rare thing for me to have a “hectic” day but I think tomorrow will indeed be hectic. Or maybe just a little stressful. No, not stressful. Worrisome. Perhaps not so worrisome as …wait, yeah. Worrisome. Just for a few hours in the morning, then it worrisome is upgraded to just plain bored for the rest of the day. Assuming that I make it to my plane on time, that is.

So tomorrow I get up, get the kids ready for school and take them 30 minutes earlier than usual which is 8:30am. (School doesn’t start until 9:00 here. WTF.) Then I speed back home, park my car, get my suitcase and backpack and WALK to the train station. Probably in the rain so add an umbrella to that. Hopefully it’s just a drizzle. But it’s only maybe a 10 - 15 minute walk. I’m supposed to be at the train station at 9:15 but it doesn’t leave until 9:45 and I don’t have baggage to check.

I’m supposed to arrive in Portland at 11:45am and my flight to NYC leaves at 1:30pm. The metro train is 6 blocks from the Amtrak station and it leads right into the airport. It takes maybe 20 - 30 minutes to get from the metro to the airport. All this is pretty easy but my worry is that the Amtrak will get delayed. And if that happens, I’m pretty screwed. And Amtrak sure seems to get delayed a lot from what I’ve observed. There’s the el_jefe incident from last year and then Nate’s delays this year. I remember my trip from Portland to Texas 10 years ago was delayed consistently for the entire trip. The Albany Amtrak guy assured me today that this is a very reliable train. It’s only got a couple of stops along the way so there’s not much that can go wrong with it. And if it’s late getting to the Albany station, I can always just run back home, get my car and drive to Portland.

If I didn’t have the kids, I could just take the 6:30am train and have hours to spare in Portland. But since this is the last time I’ll see them for 2 weeks, I didn’t want to not have them here.

I got everything packed tonight and got my laptop all primed for the trip. The damn battery is dead again. I just replaced my laptop battery a little over a year ago and now it’s dead already. It holds a charge of maybe 5 minutes. My other laptop’s hard drive quit working last week. At least my Pocket PC seems to be doing well. I just realized today why I had problems with it on my last trip - I didn’t have the box checked in the options that told it to charge the battery via the USB cable. I ended up buying a Pocket PC battery that I didn’t need. But at least I have twice the Pocket PC power now. Both batteries are completely charged for the trip. I have no book to read for this trip.

Yesterday I did laundry. And I brought my laptop with me to help pass the time for an hour. That’s when I discovered that my battery wouldn’t hold a charge. As I came back into the laundrymat from the convenience store, some guy sees me and goes, “Uhh…is that your car out there? The white one with Illinois plates?!?” I’m thinking, “Oh shit, it’s got a flat tire or he’s smashed into it or something.” Turns out he just wanted to ask me what the weather was like in Illinois.

He got a call on his cell soon after that and he told me he was receiving harassing phone calls on his cell phone. He was waiting for them to call back just once more so that he could officially file a police report. He said whoever it was wasn’t blocking their caller ID. All ready to impress him with some elite phone company social engineering skills, I asked him for the number. Unfortunately it was a local land line and that billing office would already be closed. I put the number into my laptop’s phone book database but nothing came up on it. Right about then is when my laptop battery died. It’s probably a good thing that I couldn’t find any info, because this guy seemed a little crazy and I think it was just some lady who got a wrong number and he started yelling at her. That’s what I got from his story, anyway.