Yesterday will rank up there in the top of the yucky day list. Not that I actually keep a list, mind you. I don't like to hang on to the bad stuff. This is just a hypothetical bad list.
Ben and Emily have been working all year towards flying to Hawaii for the summer to work with Child Evangelism Fellowship. They have worked for CEF every summer and this is (probably) their last chance to do so. They were able to raise enough money to cover all the fees and a portion of their plane tickets. CEF is similar to a mission trip in that the participants have to pay to go. Even though I say they "worked" for CEF, it's not work for pay. They paid for their plane tickets out of their own savings accounts and then received enough in donations to cover about a third of that cost.
The extra benefit for them, of course, is that they also get to see all of their Hawaii friends and Ben gets to see his girlfriend, Noelle. So it's not entirely an altruistic mission. One of the great things is that they would get to see the homeschool play which they have starred in for the last four years. We were really excited that the dates of their trip happened to work out so that they were arriving the day of the first performance. Ben was only going to be able to see one performance, but Emily was going to be able to see both shows. This would be their best chance to see a ton of people they've known. There are a lot of folks they won't get to see otherwise, but everyone will be at the play.
So yesterday was the day they were leaving for Hawaii. We had to get up at 4:00 to get them to St Louis in plenty of time. I checked the flight status to make sure everything was on track and all systems were go. We got their luggage checked in and I left them at the point where I could go no farther in the airport with them.
Kerry dropped me off at home and then he headed in to work. Shortly thereafter, I got a text from Emily saying that their flight had been delayed by four hours. This would cause them to miss their connecting flight. There followed a flurry of text messages and phone calls between both of them and me as we tried to sort out a solution. I wasn't worried. I told the kids they would probably get bumped to a later flight and would arrive in Hawaii later in the day than planned, but it was no big deal.
Imagine our shock then, when we found out that there was not one available flight to Hawaii until Monday. We could still get the kids to Arizona but they'd be stuck there for three days until a flight rolled around that they could go on.
Emily handled the situation very calmly but Ben was livid. His girlfriend is leaving for Argentina to attend a language study program for a large portion of the time Ben is in Hawaii so this delay was cutting into most of the only time they have together for the summer.
Several of his text messages involved violence and his final one of the day said, "I'll be in the lobby with two middle fingers extended until you get here." He's been one grumpy puppy since he got back home.
Then, to make the day even better, we had a slew of dangerous thunderstorms blow in after dinner and the tornado sirens kept going off. We ended up heading to the basement for the night because the danger wasn't going to go away before 4:00 AM. We set up our portable hammocks for the girls, made a bed out of sofa cushions for me, and Kerry just padded the floor with blankets for himself because he's tough like that and not a total weenie about sleeping on a hard floor like I am.
The dogs did not like the booming thunder and let us know that they were unhappy. Rigger stood over me and Kerry, panting like a steam engine.
It's not easy to sleep with this standing over you breathing hot dog breath in your face.
Ringo woke me up several times during the night wining and letting me know that there was a storm out there.
Fortunately, we all survived the night and maybe things will look a little brighter today.
After a nap.
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