Not a fan of Mother Nature right now!

So for anyone that has either watched the news or followed me on facebook, you probably have heard that there was a bit of a storm in the northeast US this last week.  In fact, it was one of the largest storms in decades!  I found that one of the few downsides to having JetBlue's main hubs in New York and Boston is the fact that when weather paralysis those two cities, we pretty much can't fly ANYWHERE!  It made for more cancelled flights then I've ever seen in the close to 3 years I've been working here.  As well as massive numbers of phone calls, stressed out customers, every flight for a week sold out, mandatory overtime, and very little sleep.  I really haven't been a fan of Mother Nature all week, even though half of the customers I talked to think that's my name!  Can you control the weather?  Hmmm...me either!  But for some reason people just assume that I can!  Oh well!  Thankfully it appears that things are back to normal!

Now if only she'll be nice enough to not send us any new storms for a while!

Flying Standby to Hawaii

So clear back in May I finally got a vacation that was VERY long in coming!!! My family went to Hawaii! Sorry that I haven't blogged about it before now! And honestly, I can't give you a day by day accounting at this point since I don't really remember everything we did. But here are some of the high points. In this post I'll just tell you about the joys of flying standby and then I'll do another post with stuff from Hawaii!

First off, while the rest of my family was flying first class to Hawaii, I was flying standby! It was the first time that I've used my flight benefits with a different airline than JetBlue. It was a bit nerve wracking and I spent more time in airports than I really would have liked, but it all worked out in the end! I flew Southwest down to Vegas without a problem. Ended up missing the Hawaiian Air flight though because I didn't realize that the airline wasn't in the regular terminal! So I had about 8 hours to kill in Vegas, but since I was lugging a suitcase around I couldn't do anything fun like take a taxi down to the strip! So instead, I hung out in the airport and read. Nothing too exciting! But considering how busy with work I'd been for the 5 months before this trip, I was VERY fine with just relaxing and reading! I made it on the late night Hawaiian Air flight to Honolulu and then an hour later got a connection to Kauai. If I'm remembering correctly, it ended up taking me a total of 18 hours to get to Hawaii. Not too bad.
Coming home was where the real fun began! I had built in a couple of extra days on my trip so that I could be a bit flexible about flying standby. Like, I flew out on a Thursday, got in Friday morning, but the majority of my family didn't get there until Saturday. Coming home, Scott and Kelli-Rae, along with some of her family, had flights to leave Saturday night. My parents, cousin Amy, and the rest of Kelli-Rae's family were all coming home Sunday night. So, I decided that I should attempt to go home Saturday on Scott's flight. If I didn't make it, then there were a number of options to try for Sunday. Scott then gets a phone call from Delta saying that their flight has been delayed 12 hours! Instead of leaving Saturday night at 6pm, it's leaving Sunday morning at 6am. So I ended up getting my extra night in Hawaii but had to leave very early the next morning. As for standby, the delay worked in my favor for getting on that flight. Lots of people had Delta move them to different flights because of the delay. So the flight went from having about 10 open seats to being half empty! Worked great for me. Well......it worked great until we landing in LAX!

BTW, I did learn that if I was paying for a flight, I'd proably pick Hawaiian Air over Delta.  Their plane was much nicer and the people lots friendlier!

If the flight had left at the original time, we would have landed in LAX early enough that I had about 10 options that day to get home via Southwest. Only the last one of the day was currently sold out, so I wasn't worried at all! But, with the delay, we only got there in time for that last flight and of course I didn't make it on! So, we landed in LAX at about 4pm (if I'm remembering correctly) and the first option I had to get home wasn't until the next morning! Most sane people at this point would be finding the least expensive hotel in the area and checking in for the night. But the whole reason I was going standby was to save money! I don't want to now waste part of that getting a hotel! Instead, I decided to wait it out at the airport.

I have learned a couple of tricks. First off, instead of eating some of the way overpriced fast food in the airport, I took a hotel shuttle to a nearby hotel and walked around and found somewhere close by to eat. Then took the shuttle back! Also, thankfully since I am an airline employee it was fairly easy to get what's called a gate pass so that I could go back into the terminal and back through security. Lots more comfortable sitting in the gate area rather than the check-in area!

And when I got to the point where I could barely keep my eyes open, I walked, and walked, and walked! The LAX airport is basically in the shape of a U. The road running in that shape with a bunch of terminals along the way. I walked outside back and forth along the whole thing, over and over again! I lost track of how many times, but probably at least 10-15 times! Finally I just couldn't walk any longer and went inside one of the terminals. I was terrified of sleeping, thinking that someone would come steal my stuff! But then some security guards came and sat at a table not far from where I was. I asked them how long they'd be there and they said a few hours. So, I took a nap!

Luckily I managed to get on the first flight out of LAX Monday morning. But here was the really sad part. My parents and Amy had all Sunday in Hawaii, flew out that evening, landed in SL, got all the bags, got the car from long term parking, took Amy home, and made it back to the airport just in time to pick me up!

Hmmm...I'm still debating on if it was worth it or not!

The rest of my Hawaii stuff will probably take a few days to put together, so stay tuned!

Very uninteresting life!

One of my friends, who is a great blogger, keeps teasing me about updating my blog!  I guess that I just always feel like I don't really have anything to talk about!  Basically my life is work job #1, work job #2, sleep, and repeat.  But for Chelsea, I'll attempt to think of some things to talk about! 

First off I just realized that I still have never talked about Hawaii!  It's been 7 months since we got home, so I really need to get on that!  But that'll have to be a different post, too much to say!

What else has happened in the last 7 months? 

We completely redid the living room/kitchen at my parents house.  Finally tore down the wall between the two rooms!  My mom has wanted that done for years!  I love how open it makes everything.  Now when we have people over, we aren't so cramped in either the living room or the kitchen.  Good thing that dad's really good with electrical things!  Otherwise we could have had a real mess with the plugs and light switches in that wall!  About a week after we pulled out the wall, we had a family dinner with the 5 of us, plus Grandma.  And you can't forget Trinity, and Scott and Kelli brought Ali too!  We had a big crowd for us!  Even though none of the remodel was done other than the wall coming down, we could already tell that it was going to be great!  I took some mid-project pics but I'm not sure where they are right now!  And I've never taken any after ones.  So I'll have to post those later, but it looks great!

Work at JetBlue was beyond crazy for the first 5-6 months of the year, but luckily since then things have finally calmed down and somewhat gotten back to normal!  Thank goodness!  I just about wanted to die during those months!

Hmmm...anything else?  Oh, I completely chopped most of my hair off!  I've had pretty long hair for a VERY long time.  I have extremely thick hair and it takes forever to do!  I finally just got fed up with all of it!  I had basically been wearing it in a ponytail for about a year and I figured that short had to be better than that!  Turns out that I love it short!  It's so much quicker to get done!  The only hard part is that I can't just roll out of bed, throw it back, and run to the store!  Yeah, don't have any pics of the hair either!  I'm really bad right now!  But I'll be taking pics at X-Mas and will post them so you'll see the short hair.

Also, my parents finally bought a camp trailer!  My dad loves to camp but since before I was born all that my parents have had is an old pop-up camper.  My mom just isn't a fan!  She put up with it for a number of years while Scott and I were growing up and then she just told dad that she wasn't camping any more until they got a real trailer!  It's really nice!  They bought it towards the end of the summer and still managed to use it 3 or 4 times.  I'm happy for them!  Of course, I have yet to go camping with them in it.  I keep getting stuck at home taking care of Trin!

Speaking of Trin, back in March (on my birthday of all days!) she was diagnosed with diabetes.  It's been really tough on all of us, her the worst I'm sure.  You can't explain to a dog why it is that they no longer get all of the treats that they are used to, or that they don't get bits and pieces of whatever we are eating, and that 2 times a day she has to lay down and let us jab her with a needle, and let's not forget the weekly visits to the vet to check her levels.  Amazingly enough, she has been lots better about all of this than I had expected.  I think that she'd been sick for a very long time before it got bad enough for us to realize that there was a real issue.  So maybe she understands that what we are doing is making her feel better.  She certainly acts better!  Sometimes I think that she acts like she's a puppy again!  It's been pretty fun!

Well, I think that's all the big stuff that's happened!  See, I told you, I have a very uninteresting lfe!