busybee

The insurance company put me up at the SeaTac Marriott, which is way fancier than anything in SeaTac has any right to be. Swanky as heck. Also the room’s decaf is surprisingly good!

I brought my work and studio laptop here so I could maybe get work done without having to reverse-commute if possible, although there’s definitely things I need to go back to the house for (hugging the cats, mostly, and also meeting the contractor, and so on), and of course I’d much rather work on my music in my actual studio with huge screen and proper 88-key keyboard instead of on my tiny portable keyboard and tiny laptop screen. But there’s worse situations to be in right now, I guess.

The insurance company also sprung for the pet fee in case I want to bring my cats here, but that seems like it’d be a disaster. They’re finally getting along with each other and after I left them home alone overnight on Monday they got a lot closer, and it’s also good for Tyler to NOT have me available 24/7. He gets pretty bad separation anxiety even when I go downstairs to the studio or if I sleep with the door closed, and he needs to learn that it’s okay to not have me there sometimes.

Anyway I have up to 9 days here but hopefully I won’t need all of them. If all goes well I’ll have running water again on Monday, and the bathroom should be done soon after. Given the original scope of work was a near-complete gutting of the bathroom, and now the scope is an actually-complete gutting, I can’t imagine what else would possibly go wrong that wouldn’t involve me, like, moving back to the condo for a while.

You know what I miss about the pre-9/11 days?

People being able to go to the gate to greet the traveler as they arrived.

It was always so nice to welcome people, or be welcomed. After 9/11 that little ritual went away, because now only travelers themselves were allowed beyond the security checkpoint, and nobody wanted to wait for their loved ones outside of the security checkpoint, so that very quickly made way to people waiting in the loading zone, which then turned into waiting in the cellphone lot, trying to make the whole greet-and-pick-up process as soullessly efficient as possible.

There’s a bunch of other stuff that changed so much that people are talking about, but this is a thing that I haven’t seen anyone else mention. Just this little bit of humanity that was part of the travel experience.

Then again, everything we’ve lost comes down to little bits of humanity, in the end.