It's 3:48 a.m. in Hawai‘i, but it's 8:48 a.m. in Austin. Guess which time zone my body thinks it's still in.
The flight here went a lot smoother than last time, but I still got off the plane wishing my family lived on the Mainland. I tried to get some sleep on the plane, but everyone walking down the aisle brushed past me, waking me up. The guy across the aisle spilled over into it — he was a big dude — and it frustrated me that he had to occupy that much real estate. I didn't realize till we got off the plane he took up all the seats in that entire row to accommodate a leg in a cast. Oops.
My mom asked me to take a cab home since my flight arrived pretty much at midnight. My Mainlandness showed its true colors when I realized I would need to give my cabbie directions to my house. Austin cab drivers have frakking GPS navigators in their cabs. I am beginning to take for granted just how wired Austin is.
I made it to the house at 1 a.m., knowing full well three hours from then, the damn roosters in the neighborhood would start to crow. I hadn't anticipated a stray cat catching the attention of the neighbor's dog would trump them. In short, I didn't sleep, and I made no effort.
I spent my first day here throwing all my exercise and dieting out the window. Between bad airport fast food and a Zip Pac for dinner — with Ryan and Jen! — I've packed on five pounds in 24 hours. I was hoping to spread that out over the entire week. Oh, well. I guess I'll have 35 pounds to shed when I get back to Austin.
I drove my dad to his physical therapy session, then went to the Shirokiya in Ala Moana to see if there were any Japanese CDs to be had. Ala Moana has always been a mess where the parking was concerned, but the opening of Nordstrom's has turned the traffic patterns of the lot into some weird maze random one-way turns. As I announced on Twitter, I would gladly contribute to the rehab of the engineer who designed that traffic flow. Much crack was ingested during the design of that traffic flow, it seems.
And no, I didn't find anything on my shopping list.
I tried to get some sleep before what was supposed to be family portrait photo shoot that afternoon. Except it wasn't that afteroon — it was the next day (today.) Mom had leaped to some conclusions about the portrait taking based on my sister's availability.
So it was off to Zippy's with Ryan and Jen for dinner. LOST, Battlestar Galactica, my new record label, the kids — the usual catching up. We stopped by Best Buy afterward because my mom asked me to get a VCR — no, not a DVD player — but the only models available were VCR/DVD combo players in the $200 range. Huh. No. At least Jen found a double-disc set of Grosse Point Blank and High Fidelity.
The rest of the night was spent trying to ignore Don't Forget the Lyrics before LOST. I didn't watch last week's episode yet because it was a 'shipper episode. I'm glad this week's episode actually moved the story forward.