Anabelle and Daddy Ad-veeeeen-tures! Yeah! *Jazz Hands* Day 1- July 19

Air Line Travails

While Anabelle was stuck home suffering from the plague that passed through our family early in the summer before the Central Park trip, she started marathoning Chopped.

Positive side effects included her, and all of us, increasing our interest and knowledge of cooking, leading to tastier experiments from everyone in our home.

Negative side effects included letting her stay up too late, and pausing on final packing for Rosa and Abuelita’s trip to Peru  to see how the heck they were going to work duck bills into a recipe.

By the time we finished racking, packing and stacking everything into the suitcases, and weighing and redistributing them multiple times, Rosa and I finally shut down for the night at three in the morning.

Other set up items required us waking up only an hour or two past Stupid O’clock in the morning.

I made sure to put in the Elvis CD that has the song we danced to at our wedding in her car for the drive to the airport.  Lower than usual traffic required me to skip a couple of tracks for the surprise to work.

Since I do this anytime she’s traveled without me, and she knows the CD, it wasn’t really much of a surprise.

But she liked it and it was sweet, so shut up.

I played my typical forklift role, after scavenging an abandoned cart in the parking garage.

Hey, five bucks is five bucks.

Once I hauled all their luggage where it needed to be I assisted with the, “pretty much exactly like checking in at the airport, but we already checked in online, so why do we have to do everything you used to do for us ourselves, especially when you’re helping us through every step anyway” shenanigans.

Their bags were conveyored into the black hole behind what used to be check in, and we said our sad farewells by the security line.

There was a great deal of jumping up and down to try to see them through the shoeless mob, until we got our final waves good bye.

Anabelle and I found some chairs on the upper level, where phones can get a signal if the wind is blowing in the correct direction, and waited to hear from them.

I read some old Avengers comic reprints, and Anabelle finally agreed to try reading Encyclopedia Brown, after what may have been centuries of me giving her extensive lists why it was exactly the sort of thing her mystery loving mind would enjoy.

Sadly, I wasn’t able to rub how much she enjoyed it in, as I peered over while she was reading and expressed surprise that his real name was Leroy.

She pointed out that this is mentioned in nearly every story, and considering that she knew “Bad Bad Leroy Brown” was my favorite song at the age I read those stories, was stunned I had no knowledge of this.

We agreed not to make fun of each other over young Master Brown’s stories and continued reading.

Various texts and phone calls made it through the walls of the plane to let us know they were settled on board, and Rosa told us we could leave even though they were listed with a slight delay.

They ended up sitting on the ground for an hour because some guy decided he really didn’t want to go to Peru, and the plane couldn’t leave with his luggage in it.

I found this the height of irony. When Abuelita was supposed to fly to Rosa’s sister in Denver; the Mensa members manning the gate left her sitting there in a wheelchair holding the “I need assistance boarding” tag while they boarded everyone else, gave her seat away, (Rosa called about this from our car…and was told she was on the plane in another seat.) closed the plane, and let it fly away while she sat there in a panic until a Spanish speaking passenger saw her and let her call us, and some less asinine, and in fact excessively awesome, airline workers to help her.

While the new crew immediately got her on another plane that night, (as we barreled back down the highways of New Jersey to the airport), the first plane had absolutely zero issues with zooming off to Denver with her luggage aboard while she stayed behind.

Anabelle and I spent our first afternoon alone as a Taco Tag Team, enjoying our meal as I fostered my daughter’s new found enjoyment of my favorite genre- the comedy horror movie- by watching the original Ghostbusters.

Her first sleep over that night was at Grandma’s, since I had to work the next day.  Grandma had been trying to convince my nieces and nephew to watch Spaceballs due to the return of Star Wars to the forefront of popular culture.  Since I had been trying to convince Anabelle to watch the rest of the works of Mel Brooks, lifelong fan or his that I am, we combined our convincings to continue the tradition of the McGinley Extended Family Stupid Movie Nights.

After all the laughs, the children settled down…

(Barfolomew…hee hee.)

They went to bed, and I went home to go back to the first of multiple short work weeks.


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