planes, trains, and...yeah...autos.

Years of living with an irksome tendency to miss small details when it counts (I call it holes-in-brain syndrome) have taught me that one alarm is never adequate if I must wake up. So this morning, as my iPhone let loose with a bad-to-the-bone piano riff, my regular alarm clock prepared to chime out in synthesized bells. No need. I turned it off. Getting up at 3:30 a.m. is novel enough to jar me into alertness.

Well. Fie on getting up at 3:30 a.m. only to find out--after 30 minutes in the Delta check-in line--that your flight is cancelled and they can't get you to Costa Rica until tomorrow. At 4 p.m. we returned to Baltimore-Washington International...and Rachel's off to spend tonight in Atlanta, thus avoiding a rerun of this morning's adventure. Her comrades--a small cadre from St. Mary's all of whom will be completing a final internship abroad, in pursuit of their Masters in Teaching--will spend an extra day hanging around the Costa Rican airport town of Liberia before they all catch their ride to Nosara for their homestays and classroom assignments. I'd be more inclined to fret if Rachel had not previously traveled back and forth to Panama and Nicaragua. Costa Rica is aptest, of the three, to be the safest and most touristy.

Between runs to BWI, I squeezed in a trip to the vet. Hazel's belly-licking allergy has flared beyond food-control, and today she got her first steroid injection in almost 2 years. Dr. Olexia assured me that 20 months is an exemplary record, and I should hardly kick myself that I lost my grip on my dietary mastery of her immune system. She has, at this point, been well exposed to every protein source one can offer to a domestic cat, and it's time for the big guns. Or small, I guess, as what I'm about to resort to is feeding the wee nuisance a special diet wherein the proteins are hydrolized into such short amino acid chains that they're...theoretically...barely recognized by the immune system as worthy of attack. We'll see...

Then I got Gabe launched on an expedition with the driving instructor before taking off to the airport again with Rachel. Not half-bad, was the report I got later (about the driving--which says nothing, you'll notice, about the other half,) but he has a bit of trouble maintaining focus for the full 2 hour session. I quickly scribble a reminder on the calendar to dose him pre-drive on Thursday, with the same "alertness-helper" he uses to maximize the value of a school day.

Did anyone see the article in this weekend's Parade magazine supplement about American trips by rail? That is it. That's what we'll do next year. If Jeffy's still hanging in there, I'm going to tuck him onto the Southwest Chief, jump on behind, and try a sleeping car for the first time ever! We'll stop in Santa Fe--yes. Flagstaff--yes. Anywhere between L.A. and Chicago we feel like, for that matter. Or I feel like. As for Jeff, he likes windows. And looking at stuff. And food. I think we can swing this.