Perils of Caffeine in the Evening

On the road again, this time for a short weekend visit to my mom in Perrysburg (Ohio) before heading to Atlanta Sunday to work for the week.  My mom has a tree in the basement that she wants me to haul upstairs to assemble, as well as some lightbulbs to screw in, smoke alarm batteries to replace and storm-damaged window well covers to re-settle.  I think she might want to visit with me briefly as well.

As always before I depart on one of these junkets, it was a busy week last week.  Of course, we were fortunate that we suffered no effects from the rainstorm that devastated a lot of folks just to the south of us.  I suppose if I looked hard enough, I could find something to fix, but the only thing I’ve noticed is the south-facing doors have swollen enough to make them hard to open.  I skated right out of town without dealing with any of it, though.

So, I took a red-eye flight from Seattle to Detroit, departing at 10 pm and arriving just before 5 am Eastern this morning.  Although I had a comfortable window seat that should have been perfect for sleeping, I just couldn’t doze off, and ended up reading several articles in the New York Review of Books.  I finally “slept” for about an hour, maybe less, and the drive down from Detroit was kind of bleary.

Like me, my mom’s not a “morning person”, and I’m having a little mercy on her by hanging out at a coffee shop in downtown P-burg until a reasonable hour, like 9 or 9:30.  I’m kind of tickled to see that the shop, which I’ve patronized a few times over the last couple of years when I’m here, is still in business, as the “downtown” is Victorian-picturesque, but sort of moribund.  And I really need an ass-kicking espresso right now.