After arriving home from work this evening, I lay on my tummy across our bed to read a bit from my book, which was lying on the floor. Brock (4yo) took the occasion to jump and climb on me. Nearby was most (!) of a Calvin and Hobbes comic book. At one point, he pointed to the top right panel and asked, “What does that say?” (He had done that with a couple of other pages/panels prior to this). I scanned it and then edited it on the fly, saying “You think you’re so smart”.
Brock went back to climbing and tumbling again (mostly enjoying falling down on the book that I was trying to read). After a while, he asked me again about the same panel. Then a couple of minutes later, he stopped and looked at it, and then he said, “Dad, what is this word, the one that starts with a D?”
You have to get up pretty early in the morning to get something by Brock…
Our late morning was spent here, at he house we will be renting for the first year we are in Houston (the house is empty right now and all the rooms are a neutral color):
Ben: We’re having some connectivity problems at the hotel, so bear with us while this post evolves.
This morning, we headed to the airport, leaving just before 8:00 for our 10:25 flight to Houston (technically flying on WestJet to Dallas, and then American Airlines to Houston). We roused Layne from his slumber, and he took us to the airport in his new (relatively) car and dropped us off. (Probably around 8:20).
Once in the airport, everything took a while, doing the self check-in thing – which printed off 3 of the 4 boarding passes, but wouldn’t print baggage tags. Then it was in to the WestJet lineup for those who didn’t have baggage tags. Then on to the US Immigration lineup, which was pretty long and sort of crawled along slowly. When we made it to the border agent, I let them know that I was filing a non-immigrant petition for an L-1A visa. Well, this had to be handled by someone else in the Secondary Processing office.
So off we went to secondary processing, and happily were the only people in the office. At this point, it was probably about 9:40 (although to be fair to others, I wasn’t taking exact notes of what happened when), plenty of time. Well, not so much, it was a couple of minutes before the agent showed up. We started the process and things moved along. For the most part, “moved along” meaning that Lori and I sat in the waiting area and watched the clock. I remember noting at one point (a few minutes in at this point) that it was 9:55, but we still had plenty of time. Then the agent was called away to deal with someone who needed to speak to a supervisor. Then a while later, someone else came in who had an easier visa to deal with, so he was handled right away. By the time that we were done, we both really had to go to the bathroom, and it was around 10:20 am, about 5 minutes before the flight was to leave. We had yet to go through security (the take off your shoes, belt and nose ring kind) and were a long walk from the gate (pretty much the farthest one) we were leaving from. We made it onto the flight at about 10:32 (there were a couple of others in the same predicament – but with good connecting flight excuses, I believe). Of course, we couldn’t use the bathrooms until after take-off happened and the seat belt sign went off. And somewhere along the way, my nose ring disappeared…
The first leg of the flight was on WestJet from Calgary to Dallas. The plane was only about half-full at most, so the stewardess suggested that Lori and I move places (after the seat belt sign went off), and we got a set of 3 seats to ourselves. Hurray! A window seat for Ben.
