November 17th.

Stupid Canada. I'm so tired it hurts. My legs are heavy.

On the plus side, oatmeal + wine cooler = dinner of champions.

A few of my favorite things.

Kittens. Mittens. Kittens in mittens (see here - is this some form of [hilarious] animal torture, or just awesome?). Sunrises. Seeing other planes from my plane. Puns. Cheese enchiladas. Seeing the city (any city) from above on a clear night. Daffodils. Sweaters. The smell of cinnamon. Holding hands. Twist cones. Listening to Eric talk to himself. Bowling. Socks. Chapstick.

And watching people on my plane. I really love when there's turbulence and everyone bounces in their seats in unison: left, right, up, back down. Heads bobbing, elbows lifting off the armrests of their own accord. It always makes me smile to myself, just a little.

That doesn't make me evil, does it?

November 16th.

Blogging every day is hard. For one thing, it's suprisingly difficult to remember what I have or have not written about. But mostly, I'm just not that interesting! (See: Twilight babble.)

For example. Would you like to know what I did today? Here it is. I slept till noon; delightful. I got up, checked my email, ran some water through the coffee pot to get it hot. I made and consumed oatmeal and hot chocolate. I watched tv. I interneted some more. I showered, got half dressed. (If I don't plan on leaving my room, what's the point of getting dressed when I'm just going to have to put on my uniform anyway?) More eating, interneting, tv watching. And now I'm blogging. See? So boring!

It is exciting to me that I brought food on this trip. The only money I've spent was $1.05 to buy some lifesavers the other day. It's a nice change. Better for me (whole wheat pitas and vegetables and fresh fruits!), and much, much better for my wallet. So I guess that's pretty exciting, for me if for no one else.


The life of an airline employee is, at all times, up in the air. (See what I did there?) When we're not literally up in the air, our schedules are always always always subject to change, due to weather, or maintenance, or someone else calling sick; any number of factors can change our trip at any time.

Yesterday as I was getting dressed to leave my room, scheduling called me. It's never a good thing when scheduling calls you. She told me they had a change to my schedule for Tuesday, day 4 of 4. Instead of doing my EAU-RHI turn (four very short flights, none of which require a beverage service) and being done at 5:50pm, they were sending me on a Montreal turn on my least favorite plane and extending me two hours and thirty minutes, so that I'll be done at 8:20pm.

I think the woman I talked to was braced for me to start yelling; scheduling gets that a lot, and I do not envy their job. But, technically, they are allowed to extend me up to three hours on the last day if a trip, so what can I do? Yelling doesn't help anything. I said ok, thanked her for telling me, hung up and sighed. I'm not looking forward to the new turn, but on the bright side, I could use the practice, and I'll probably be able to get a Twix bar or two out of the switch.


Another reason blogging every day so hard? Having to type out entries on mypod! I swear I backspace just as much as I type. Maybe next time I'll leave all my errors in, for your decrypting pleasure.

November 15th.

I read New Moon today. All of it. In between flights, downtime during flights, in my hotel. I don't work until 5pm Monday, so I could stay up late to finish it. Did I mention I've read it more than once before? I think I'll start it again tomorrow, go slower, see what the movie might look like in my head.

(I actually finished it at about 2am, so I guess I didn't technically read it all on the 15th. But it was definitely wthin 24 hours of starting it.)

Oh, and I totally cried. Not at the bad part at the beginning, because I was sitting in the airport at the time, but a lot at the end. I love when I get so into books that they make me cry, or laugh out loud. Also, I may or may not be a huge sap. Whatever.

Non-Twilight-related post coming soon, I swear. Probably.

November 14th.

I am so in love with my hotel room right now. I actually brought a lunchbox full of food for this four-day, and it is delicious. This hotel room has a fridge, so I don't have to be paranoid about my meat and cheese. I have a ginormous bed, a big flat screen tv, and even a DVD player! Not that I have any DVDs to watch, but it still is a nice touch. Plus I started rereading Twilight, and as slightly ashamed as I am about my crazy fangirlness, I cannot deny how happy reading this book makes me. I'm already halfway through it!

I guess my only point tonight is that I'm in a really good mood, and it's been a really good day.

Also, I'm already in pajamas, and have been for over an hour. And I don't have to get up at a ridiculous hour in the morning. And I love the software update that I caved and bought for my pod.

See? Such a good day/mood that I can't even end the entry, because I keep thinking of new things!

Twilight spoilers!

You've been warned. There are spoilers to follow. Also, hilariousity.





It's pretty ridiculous how much I love these books. But I'm not ashamed. Mostly.

November 13th.

It's Friday the 13th.

I don't have a good voice today. For writing, that is. I can speak just fine.

This is approximately the third entry I've started today, and I'm just not feeling it.

Maybe it's the lack of caffeine. I'm on day six of no pop.... but I'm caving. There's a coke in the freezer getting cold for me. I think I'm just going to try to stop drinking pop at work and at restaurants. At home, there is no coffee, and I'm too much of a caffeine addict and pop lover to give it up altogether.

I think it's time to watch Love Actually. Again.

November 11th.

One of my fellow bell choir members told me tonight that I need to do less drugs before coming to bells. And that about sums up my day.

November 10th.

I had four flights today. Their flight numbers were 3373, 3337, 3377... and 3368. If you were trying to confuse the crap out of me, schedulers, consider your mission accomplished.

Today I took a nap in the crew rest room (not to be confused with restroom) for the first time ever. It was delightful. I dreamt of sushi, which was weird, and I left my coat in the restroom (not to be confused with rest room) afterwards, which was bad.

I am currently in the future (does that even make sense?), but it's not as exciting as it sounds. It's 8:43pm, and I'll be sleeping soon. This is considerably less lame when you consider that I've been up since 4 this morning, and my alarm is set to go off at 3:45 tomorrow morning. Ugh.

Tomorrow will be a very, very long day. But the evening festivities will make it all worthwhile. There are wings or bowling balls in my future. I don't know which yet, but either way, I'm stoked.

Blog!

I am nothing if not a procrastinator.

Somewhere in the middle of October, I found myself perusing the "How to Write Books" books at the bookstore. I looked at the cute little NaNoWriMo-in-a-box kit and thought how fun it would be to participate this year. (NaNoWriMo is National Novel Writing Month, in which you are supposed to write a novel. In a month. It's about quantity, not quality, and it's to get you started and show yourself that yes, it actually can be done.) But, knowing myself as I do, I knew that I wouldn't do it. Or, even if I did decide to, I wouldn't finish. I did think, though, that it would be fun instead to try to blog every day in November. I made a mental note to attempt such a feat.

In case you didn't notice, it's November 9th, and my last entry was almost a month ago.

So that failed.

But I'm here now, so let me tell you a bit about how my life's been since that last entry. In a word: awesome. If I could pick two words, they'd be awesome and busy. More words, and things start getting worse (delayed. unscheduled. smelly. unhealthy.), but really, overall awesome.

I've had some great crews, including a crew on my least favorite plane, for a last-minute overnight that was thrown onto my schedule after a long day of being stuck in one tiny room wih a broken airplane sitting uselessly outside. As unhappy as I was with the change to my schedule, it ended up being one of the best times I've had with a crew.
My bff got and started a job. Not only am I happy for her about this in general, I'm also glad that she's actually liking it so far. A happy her is a happy us.
My cousin who has lived in North Carolina for the past ten years and who I often miss seeing evem when she is in town thanks to my job has just decided to move back to Minnesota.
And, of course, my awesome new boyfriend has given me a plethora of reasons to be smiley and awesome.

As for busy, boy let me tell you. Every month, flight attendants are guaranteed 75 flight hours. When I place my bid every month (aka when I tell the computer what I'd like my schedule to look like the next month, which days I need off, etc), I bid ti get as many hours as possible in as few days as possible, to maximize time off. This month, I also decided to allow my schedule to be built with only one day off in between trips instead of the standard two, in hopes that I would get a nice string of a lot of days off at some point in the month. I had no such luck. In November, I have the minimum number of days off allowed in a month (a mere ten), and 90 flight hours. 90. 90 is a ridiculous number of hours to have built into your schedule, especially for someone as low in seniority as me, and especially considering I didn't request more than the standard 75. In all of November, I never have more than two days off in a row, every single one of my trips is a four-day, and I only have one day off in between some of them.

As I said, besides awesome, my month has been (and will continue to be) busy.

There is a ladybug trying to find a comfortable perch inside my lampshade. Scared the crap out of about two minutes ago.

Anyway, now that it's the second week of November, I'd like to try my November daily blogging goal. I know, I know. You're probably thinking, "Cindy, how on earth will you manage that?"

I guess you'll just have to stay tuned to find out.


P.S. I was going to wait to post this so I could look it over on an actual screen instead of here on mypod, but in an effort to kick off blogmonth, fuck that, I'll just post it as-is. Please forgive any typographical errors. Erroneous "b"s are probably supposed to be spaces between words. Kthxbai.