O glorious chariot, I christen thee...

I should be packing but instead I'm glued to my 'puter as usual. I leave for L.A. tomorrow...my flight's at 7 pm so I'm going to the airport straight from work. That means I have to have everything ready to go by tomorrow morning. Somehow it always takes me as long to pack as I have time. If I have three hours, it takes three hours. If I have one hour, it takes one hour. Hmm.

I think I thought of a name for my car. I was referring to her as a princess in my last post, but didn't feel that was quite right because she's got an edge. So how about this: Fiona. As in, the princess from Shrek who is pretty and graceful yet spunky and can kick some butt.


The only part that doesn't quite fit is the fact that Fiona turns out to actually be an ogre...

We will try Fiona for a while, but I'm not above changing it if I think of something that fits better. I got a kitten the summer I moved into my condo, and my first name for him was Jupiter (the song Drops of Jupiter by Train was playing nonstop on the radio at the time). It never felt right though. About 4-6 weeks later the perfect name just popped into my head: Simba, of course! The Lion King is one of my favorite movies, and my cat was orange, so it felt perfect!

So today I drove out to Troy, NC to do a training. It's about 90 minutes from where I live. I think the training went very well. The first session completed on schedule, but the second session started an hour late because everyone was in a budget meeting. This turned out to be a blessing in disguise, though, because while I was waiting for everyone, I got a call from work and they alerted me that the system was experiencing 20-minute delays...which means if we had been sending a test call it wouldn't have gone through quickly and I would have had egg on my face again, a la Georgia. I was so grateful for the heads-up. They even gave me a good alibi to explain the situation. But fortunately the training was so delayed, by then the system was back to normal, and everything worked perfectly! The only frustrating part was that everyone was using laptop computers that had touchpads for the mouse...and they had never used one before! So they were all verrrrry slow. I did my best Patient though so if my boss calls them they should say good things about me.

I had to get a rental car to drive to Troy because mine was in the shop getting some cosmetic work done. I got a Chevy Malibu. Pretty nice. I liked the stereo. When you selected a radio station, it displayed the call letters, genre, and the name and artist of the song currently playing. And, the volume was speed-sensitive, so when you came to a stop light the music would get quieter, and when you sped up it would get louder. Also, it had automatic headlights so you didn't have to worry about turning them off. Even with all that, though, I still like my car better. It has a more comfortable seat and a smoother ride.

Returning the car to Enterprise was quite an enterprise, ha ha. There were like 7 or 8 people in line and only two guys behind the desk. Then one of them vanished for like 20 minutes because he had to clean a car for the customer who was going to rent it. To top that off, they ran out of invoice forms so everyone had to hand-write their info down. With all this activity, I felt bad asking for a ride back to Carmax but eventually (i.e., 45 minutes later) I did get a ride. As for whether I can tell they did anything to my car or not...I can see that the paint overspray was removed, but is the paint uniformly shiny all around the car? Since the car was dirty from today's rain, it's hard to say.

Okay, I should get to that packing now. I probably won't post until I get back on Tuesday (and maybe not even then because I fly in at 6 am and go straight to work from the airport Tuesday morning...I will be beat by the end of the day!). Have a lovely weekend everybody!

One more thing: I drove a total of 200 miles in the rental car. I forgot to fill it up with gas before I returned it, but the Enterprise office was so crazy that the guy didn't charge me. I pointed it out but he just waved his hand and said forget it. Score!