Tuesday, June 11 George, Harold, Jasper?

It all began in May when Jon made a visit to LabCorp for his monthly blood check. I decided to wait in the lobby and maybe enjoy some juicy gossip magazine or get a new recipe from Good Housekeeping. Nope. Not in the stars. All that sat on the small excuse-of-a-table was Golf Digest, Fortune 500 and some other oddball magazine. I did salvage a Consumer Digest in which I became enthralled in the latest review of GPS devices. Knowing our trip to Minnesota was the next day, I had an ah-ha moment. We needed one.

Our next stop was Walmart for snacks and Jon's haircut. I went to look at the prices of their GPS systems. There it was--singing Halleluja and calling my name--a Garmin complete with a red clearance tag. Oh, I bought it on the spot.

Ecstatic, I now had a new friend for the cross-country trek. He kept me company the entire way, except when I was snoozing (maybe 80% of the trip). There were two voice choices--Jack or Jill. For reasons I won't explain, I programmed the male voice. I couldn't call him "jack" so I quickly nicknamed, "George." Jon called him "Harold." And for some unknown reason, Lydia called him, "Jasper." Whatever.

This morning Jon flew off to Fargo, North Dakota for the Holocaust Conference sponsored by the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. Jon works for the museum and is in charge of this MidWest Conference. For the last 9 months he has planned, developed, organized and confirmed the entire itenerary. He has put unbelievable time, worry and work into this large conference. Teachers are coming from far and near. (I am so proud of him and stand in awe of his work.)

With that said, the OCD kicked in. Last night before he went to bed, he asked Lydia for directions to the Rochester Airport. At the most it is 15 minutes away. Lydia's directions were very simple. In addition, Jon and I had passed the airport coming to her home and I had made mental notes on how to get there. This was going to be easy. Lydia's directions confirmed the direct path.

Jon's plane flew out about 7:30. (So he said. Knowing Jon it was 8:30, he just wanted to give himself plenty of time.) We set 5, yes FIVE alarm clocks. I'm sure we would have set more if we could have found them. Most of the alarms were on my and Jon's cell phones. We also took Jeff's work alarm clock, the only alarm clock in the house. Poor Jeff. He set his own cell phone alarm.

We were up and ready to go by say 4:20. In my hand I had directions from Triple A (aaa.com) and ever faithful MapQuest.com. We had Lydia's directions written down also. I plopped into the passenger side of the Jetta while Jon loaded his suitcase. When he got in, you guessed it, he handed me Harold. Jasper blurted out the same, famliar directions. It took us 12 minutes. There was no traffic. The airport, thank goodness, was open.

Jon caught his airplane. On time.