half a work week in one day

I had to meet with two seperate clients down south on tuesday. i was travelling with 3 other co-workers and we left at 5:30am in hopes of reaching desination 1 by 10am, which required that i arise at 4am to get to the office in time since i live about 40 minutes away.

Some friends talked me into going out for ONE drink on Monday night after work, which of course turned into me dragging my ass home at around 10:30, smacking myself upside the head 'cause I was only going to get about 4 hours of sleep, but almost worth it because it was a good time.

The road trip down south was fairly decent and uneventful, except for the brief stop at mickey d's for breakfast which led to the discovery of the turbo leaf blower cleverly disguised as a hand dryer in the restrooms and the mysterious coffee gnome that kept projectile spitting one co-workers coffee right out of his cup at random intervals for no findable reason, which happened just after the epic cream fight with the cashier who just could not understand my response to her question of how many creams I would like, which was "many", requiring me to actually have to say "ok, like 3 each?" Apparently I violated some major mickey d's cream quota!

Generally the client meetings went well, and we wrapped up just in time to jump into full blown LA traffic - ok, I am sorry, but seriously how and why does anyone live there, its just awful. I would hurt someone if I had to face that every day. It took 2 and a half, long painful hours to go about 70 miles at which point we decided to pull over and get some dinner. Dinner was really nice, and very pleasant.

On the road back home after dinner, I am driving and at about 9pm as we are on 101 near Rincon, with the pacific ocean stretched out on the left, we get a phone call from one co-workers wife, we in the car hear this: (his side of the conversation only)

"what!?"
"oh ya, right."
"the whole west coast, sure."
"really?"
"down to mexico?"
"shit, ok, i'll call you back."

At which point he explains to us what the rest of the world home in front of the TV already knew, that there was a big quake off the norcal coast and a tsunami was possible, folks had been evacuated and the entire california and oregon coast was on alert. This is not good news when you have a mountain on one side, the ocean on the other and no place to go to get away from it. We try not to panic, and find a local news station on the radio. Very shortly thereafter, we find out that the quake happened about 2 hours previously and there are no signs of a tsunami and that the whole thing will likely be called off, quite a relief, but what a bizarre 15 minutes or so!

I finally arrived home about a quarter to midnight, sleep is sooooo good!