Well, they did it again, those AIM kids.  Today I watched them present about half a dozen patriotic songs to a very enthusiastic crowd of veterans at the Red Roof Mall.  Yes, they did a superb job.  Yes, Josiah was Jeremiah Denton.  Yes, I bawled my eyes out.    Why DO I put on makeup before these things?

Oct 4, 2009

The murderous United agent having disappeared from Planet Earth, we were forced to re-explain our overweight bag situation to yet another non-native-English speaker.  He got the concept, confirmed that Big Red was now under the magic 50 pounds, and waved us away.

We (Katie and I, not the non-native-English speaking United agent!) shared a brief goodbye hug, I tried unsuccessfully not to cry, and Katie fast-walked (evidently the default walking speed of college sophomores in northern Virginia) out to the car, while I made a beeline for security.

Once entrenched in the security line, I realized that I had failed to find a bathroom where I could empty out my water bottle (so as to keep it with me), so I had to trash it and resign myself to spending another $3 on a small water bottle without the sport cap.  Sigh.

Once my lovely hefty carry-on and I had made it through security and I my feet were again shod, the rest of the trip was uneventful.  I boarded the big plane when I was supposed to (only 30 minutes before departure, as this one was not continuing on overseas), and there was sufficient room in the overhead bin for my carry-on.  A nice gentleman hoisted it aloft for me.  I spent most of that flight and all of my two hour layover in Chicago systematically dissecting Josiah’s research paper.  (They really don’t pay us moms nearly enough for the proofreading we do.  Where’s MY bail-out and stimulus package?!??)  At O-Hare, I enjoyed a salad at Quizno’s that was quite tasty.    I returned to Springfield in a plane that was substantially (not) larger than the one in which I had departed (two and two seats, instead of one and two).  The carry-on still had to be gate checked.

It was about 5:00 PM Sunday when I arrived, and the rest of my family was there to greet me, having stayed in town after church and then gone bike riding on the Frisco Highline Trail.  I need to confirm exactly how many miles they rode, but I think it was something approaching twenty.  They were all excited, slightly sunburned, and worn out.  I was only excited and worn out.

We returned a borrowed bike to the Halls, had a fine dinner at Boston Market (note outstanding customer service by Felicia), and drove home.  All things considered – and it should be obvious that I do tend to consider ALL things – it was a trip I’ll always remember fondly and the best birthday present I have ever received.

Oct 4, 2009

So my brilliant idea was to pack my carry-on bag inside Big Red.  Having off-loaded all the junk food and carrot cake, there was plenty of room in Big Red.  I could fill the carry-on and then pack dirty clothes, the backpack, and other odds and ends in the remaining space around it.  All I’d have to carry with me would be my shoulder bag/purse, and that would be WONDERFUL.

With much effort (that I’m not smart enough to understand, much less explain), Katie eventually got my bag checked online.  It took much more effort to print out the baggage claim document and boarding passes, but after re-wiring the hotel’s guest computer, she managed the printouts, as well.  We also saved Scott something like $10 by checking the bag online.  Katie was especially pleased that we would NOT have to stand in the long, snaky normal line at the United counter, but would be able to walk right up, turn in Big Red, (not collect $200), say goodbye, and send me straight to security.  It would be so sweet.

Sunday morning, I was up early and Katie was not.  She did tumble out of bed 6.3 minutes before our scheduled departure.  We arrived at Dulles to learn that we would have to pay to park (“$4 for the first hour or any part thereof”), but when we got inside, Katie was absolutely correct.  The check-in line at the United counter was exceedingly long, but we smugly walked past all those poor souls and straight up to the short (one person, as I recall) line designed for well-prepared folks who had checked their bags online.

When it was my turn, I presented my I.D. and the paperwork Katie had printed out while Katie hefted Big Red onto the little metal pass-through step.  I believe I have mentioned before that in northern Virginia there are no employees hotels, restaurants, airports, or airlines for whom English is their native language.  The gentleman I faced at the United check-in station was no exception.  Our conversation went like this.

United Agent:  We haff a probe-lem.

Me:  We do?

United Agent:  Yes.  Your bag iss over.

Me:  Excuse me?

United Agent (pointing to the LED display above Big Red):  Your bag iss over.  See?

Me (slowly realizing that he thought my bag weighed too much):  You’ve got to be kidding!

United Agent (looking as serious as a 9/11 attack):  The bag iss OVER!

Me (studying the LED that said “60″ in red numbers):  Well, what’s the limit?

United Agent:  The bag only weighs fifty.  It is sixty.  It iss OVER.

Me (realizing I will now have to fork out more of Scott’s money to pay for my overweight bag, and that it will probably be more than the $10 we saved by checking it online):  So how much more do I have to pay?

United Agent:  NO!  If you pay, I kill you!!!

Me (shocked, slightly embarrassed, and wondering if I should be scared):  You KILL me?!?!?

United Agent:  I kill you.

For once I was stunned into silence.  Security is the watchword for air travel today, and now an airline employee is going to KILL me (in front of God and everyone) just because my bag is overweight?  I didn’t know what to say.

The United Agent leaned forward and said in a soft and conspiratorial tone, “One hundred twenty-five.”

Me:  Dollars?

United Agent:  Yace.

Me (laughing nervously):  Well, I can’t do that.  What should I do?

United Agent:  You take something out.  Then you come back to me.

He ushered us away from the counter.  Now what?  I couldn’t just take ten pounds’ worth of things out of Big Red and throw it away!  Everything in that suitcase needed to go home with me!  If I couldn’t get it home in checked bag under the plane, I’d have to take it home in a (you guessed it) – carry-on bag with me inside the plane.  Sigh.

Of course, there were no tables or any other horizontal surfaces on which to open and dissect Big Red’s contents, so we ended up stepping a few feet out of the short line and simply flopping Big Red on the floor for this procedure.

First we extricated the carry-on bag.  Next, I tried to figure out what relatively lightweight things I could shove into the carry-on bag for the homeward jaunt.  We pawed through dirty clothes, the backpack and other miscellany, madly flinging and stuffing. We tried to ignore the other passengers who were surely watching us and thinking about Yours Truly, “oh, the poor fool.”  Then we zipped both bags shut again and returned to the counter, where we had to wait behind one customer (who had been smart enough to keep HIS online-checked bag under the magic 50 pounds), and where our friendly murderous United Agent was now nowhere to be seen.

Oct 3, 2009

Saturday night, as I began packing up – no small endeavor, as you will soon realize – Katie told me that, instead of taking me to the airport and dropping me at the curb, she’d park and go in with me.  I told her I didn’t think that was necessary.  After all, hadn’t she picked me up at the curb when I arrived?  And hadn’t all been was well?  She, however, felt that it would be best if she went in with me.

You see, Katie has her dad’s genes for creative financing, and she has been using her car to make a little cash on the side by shuttling folks to and from the airport for a fee.  I think it’s about a 35 minute or so drive from Patrick Henry to Dulles.  When she travels home and back, she has to arrange to get to and from the airport, and I guess she figured if someone else can run a taxi service, she can, too.  Between all those trips and her own many trips through Dulles as a passenger, she has become very familiar with that airport.

I asked if she’d have to park at Dulles.  “No, the first thirty minutes is free, and we’ll check your bag online, so I’ll be in and out really quick.”

“Are you SURE the first thirty minutes is free?”  That is the case in Springfield, but Springfield is small potatoes compared to Dulles, which is supposedly one of the busiest airports in the U.S.

“I think so, but now that you mention it, I don’t think I’ve ever actually parked at Dulles.”  You know time-constrained college kids:  she just drops her departing passengers at the curb and waits for her arriving passengers in the cell phone lot.

At that point, she powered up her laptop and went online to check my bag.  I studied the monster bag, the carry-on bag, and my shoulder bag/purse and tried to figure out a way to simplify the packing procedure.  I had come to Virginia with a LOT of stuff:  business casual clothes for classes; jeans and tennies for touring; a gift basket for Katie’s roommates’ parents; our “Hail to the Chief” board game; my Bible and notebook; a few other books for plane rides; my knitting; Josiah’s research paper to proof; a backpack for hauling changes of clothes to and from campus; a carrot cake; and last, but definitely not least, a huge stash of junk food for Katie.  Most all of that had been crammed into Big Red, which had been (for a fee of $25) checked on the outbound flights.  I had kept the shoulder bag/purse and carry-on with me, sort of.

My carry-on is a very nice little suitcase that serves me very well.  It is deemed by the airlines to be a standard acceptable size for carry-on bags.  That is all well and good, but there’s a slight problem when my carry-on travels on the crop dusters that fly from Springfield to Chicago:  it won’t fit in their overhead bins.  Not to worry.  It is gate-checked, which means that it’s not a checked bag, I don’t have to pay a checked bag fee, and I get to keep it with me, UNTIL I get to get to board the plane.  At that point, it receives a little green neon tag, I get the tag stub, and my trusty carry-on is taken from me and thrown into the bottom of the plane, while I contort myself into the top of the plane.  When we arrive in Chicago, I get off the plane and stand there at the gate, and a friendly baggage handler pulls out my bag and returns it to me.

This system works all right, but it is a bit cumbersome, especially if time is of the essence.  Which it usually is in air travel.  I have learned that it’s much like the army:  hurry up and wait.  For example, when I arrived in Chicago on my way to Virginia, I deplaned, claimed my carry-on, and began the cross country hike from the far end of Terminal B to the farther end of Terminal F.  I had an hour before my next flight, but when I arrived at the appropriate Terminal F gate fifteen minutes later, it was announced that my next flight would be boarding in five minutes!  What?  Did I really want to wolf down my pre-packed lunch, clamber aboard, and sit in a cramped airplane for forty minutes before departure?  Heck no!  I wanted to eat my lunch in a leisurely manner, use a bathroom that is bigger than a postage stamp, and board the plane ten minutes before departure.

So that is exactly what I – the inexperienced traveler of the year nominee – did.  And then I realized the error of my ways.  It seemed that while I munched my turkey and Swiss and watched those 438 people board ahead of me, they put all their carry-ons in the overhead bins, leaving me, the late boarder nowhere to stow my carry-on!  And of course, I was seated three rows from the back of the plane, so getting the bag back up front to be gate checked was out of the question.  A nice man managed to find some space in one bin and he did muscle my bag into it, but I am pretty sure mine was the very last bag to be stowed anywhere in the top of that plane.

Going home, I wanted to avoid these issues.  I didn’t want to drag my carry-on through the Chicago airport a distance roughly equivalent to a marathon route, and I didn’t want to have to board the Dulles to Chicago flight an hour early just to insure my bag’s position in a bin.  I certainly didn’t want to pay to check the carry-on; I just really didn’t want to have to deal with it at all.  And then a flash of true brilliance sped through my cranium!

(to be continued. . . )

Oct 3, 2009

Departing the Natural History Museum, we trekked more or less next door to the Museum of American History and had a fine lunch (one of us – chicken fingers and fries, one of us – veggie pizza and apple) at the Stars and Stripes Cafe.  Then it was upstairs to the main event:  the Star-Spangled Banner.

Yes, the actual flag that flew over Ft. McHenry during the Battle of Baltimore, the very one that inspired Francis Scott Key to write “The Star-Spangled Banner,” is on display at the Smithsonian!  Our family had been to the American History Museum some seven years ago, but the flag was being renovated or something then, and we didn’t get to see it.  This was a really big deal to me, being as how I am SO patriotic.  You know, for years I have made it a habit when at Silver dollar City  to take the kids to the Old Schoolhouse so we could all hear “Miss Bonnie Jean” once again tell the Battle of Baltimore story.   I love the story, and her telling of it is (was) superb.  It’s always made me want to see that flag, and standing there in the Smithsonian, I was so excited that it was about to happen.

We walked up a sloped hallway with displays and verbiage that tell about the history of what led up to that event.  Then we turned a corner, and there, in an enormous floor-to-ceiling glass case is THE Star-Spangled Banner.  It’s lying flat (sort of) and the whole area is kind of dark with no photography allowed, because light causes the material to deteriorate.  You can walk along past the flag, or just sit on benches and look at it.  Parts of the flag are gone due to wear and tear, pieces torn off years ago as souvenirs, etc., so it’s not as big as it was when created.  I don’t remember the exact dimensions, but I think what remains is something like 30 feet by 35 feet.  It’s a huge flag.

I stood there and looked at it for a long time and cried.

Then we walked out the other side and down a corresponding hallway that tells about its history since the battle.  And then we were back in the brightly lit main part of the museum, but oh, what an experience that was!

In the next few hours, we saw many other great exhibits, although the dollhouse was gone in order to have its lighting system updated (boo hoo).  We saw many, many precious and unique items, most of which I can’t recall right now, but I do remember this one:  the actual table and the chairs Grant and Lee sat in at Appomattox.  Wow.  We also walked through the history of all the wars the U.S. has fought from the Revolution to the Gulf Wars.  That was one L-O-N-G exhibit.

We had a full, fun day, took the Metro back to the car (playing the alphabet game on the way), drove back to the hotel, watched a little TV, and then went on a wild goose (or chicken) chase for KFC.  I think we went almost into the next county trying to follow directions provided by the hotel, but it was really all my fault.  I, the navigatrix, was looking at the KFC directions at the bottom of the page, while it turns out there were also KFC directions at the top of the page; the latter restaurant being only just around the corner from the hotel, and the former being in some location known only to God himself.  At least after we’d driven in a 45-minutes circle, we were good and hungry when we found the nearer one.

That night, I began packing up my stuff for the journey home.

(to be continued. . . )

As mentioned earlier, there’s no way to see all of even one of the Smithsonian museums in a day, and we were tackling two.  Once in the Natural History museum, we decided to take it one floor at a time.  First floor:  live coral reef and mammals by continent.

The mammals were good, but the coral reef was GREAT!  In a large glass tank we could see dozens of corals, anemones, sea urchins, etc., plus there were loads of brilliantly colored fish swimming around.  It was beautiful and amazing – a good choice.

On the upper floors, we sought unsuccessfully for large displays of butterflies and/or sea shells.  We did find a few neat specimens of each in various places, but no large collection of either.  = (   However, in our ongoing search for sea shells and butterflies, we did locate some other cool insects and snakes of all sizes. . . and skeletons!

The Smithsonian has many more skeletons than you could shake a rib at.  They range from hummingbirds up to elephants and include everything imaginable (and a few things unimaginable) in between.  We were both fascinated and impressed by room after room after room full of skeletons.

As our time in Natural History wound down, we decided to take in gemstones.  The Hope Diamond is displayed in a special case, and it that same room are many other gorgeous pieces of jewelry.  However, neither Katie nor I are deeply into that stuff, so we bypassed the layered crowds around and near the Hope Diamond and wandered on back through the other minerals – the one that were just taken from the earth and not polished or cut.

Wow!  Wow!  Wow!  For me, other than the live coral reef, NOTHING compared to those minerals.  I can’t even begin to describe them.  The shapes, the crystalline forms, the brilliance of the colors – Wow!  Wow!  Wow!  We could have spent another hour just admiring the amazing intricacy of the stuff God put underground.  I just can’t say enough about those minerals, but it was past noon and time to head to the Museum of American History.

(to be continued. . . )

Saturday, Oct 3 – my 49th birthday!

I have figured out that people who work in Washington, D.C. have a mandatory minimum one-hour commute.  They must either drive themselves into town (45 minutes fighting beltway traffic + 15 minutes trying to find a parking place) OR take the Metro (30 minute drive to station + 30 minute subway ride).  We chose the latter.

Both of us had been to the Smithsonian several times before.  In fact, Katie and her friend, Nicole, had been there only two or three weekends earlier.  Given that, it was REALLY special for her to take me there again.  = )  We had decided that we would attempt to do the Natural History Museum in the morning and the American History Museum in the afternoon.  Of course, those were admittedly ludicrous goals; one could very easily kill a full day in either one,  but we decided we would only endeavor to peruse the things that were of great interest to us, so we’d be able to skip much and save lots of time.  It was a nice thought.

We hoped to arrive at the first museum around 10:00 or 10:30 AM, so we left Fairfield Inn at 9:00 AM, drove to the nearest Metro Station (the one at the far west end of the line from D.C.), with effort found our way into a parking garage, bought our tickets (boy, am I glad Katie was there to negotiate that machine for me!), and stood on the platform awaiting our train. As we waited, some other tourists appeared, and one gentleman asked Katie something about if he and his wife were going to the Smithsonian, should they get off at the Smithsonian station or the Federal Triangle Station.  Seemed obviously the former to me, and of course Katie and I were traveling paperless (we had no Metro map), but when Katie pored over his Metro and D.C. map, she ascertained that it we would all actually do better to get off at Federal Triangle – which we did.  In fact, we emerged into sunlight (though rain had been forecast for the whole day) less than two blocks from the Natural History Museum, and we didn’t even have to hike across the Mall.  How pleasant!

(to be continued. . . )

I found them the morning after I posted their loss.  They were on the lower shelf of my nightstand, behind a pair of tennis shoes.  Go figure.

In other lost and found news, I, the keeper of our kids’ mime team’s presentation gloves, went to get the glove box out a couple days ago, because the team had a presentation scheduled for today.  I went to where the glove box should be (up on the shelf in the playroom) and to my complete dismay, there were no team gloves there at all.

This was highly disconcerting, as I didn’t know if we had enough spare gloves to prepare a set for our now very large (19?  20?) team.  The children and I looked high and low – literally  – all over the playroom, Jessica’s room, the attic, our office, the pantry, the cellar, Jessica’s car, the van, and Andrew’s room.   We didn’t venture into Josiah’s room, because it’s a war zone in there.

No team gloves.

Now, these gloves are really hard to lose.  They were stored in a clear box that’s about 12″ by 8″ by 16″ high.  It’s not a small box.  It won’t fit under a bed.  It’s not the kind of thing that could just vanish from sight beneath or behind something else.   Realizing that I had responsibility to provide a lot of gloves in various sizes in two days, I pulled out all the new and/or extra gloves and started sorting and labeling them.  I was able to scrounge together enough, but some of them were those old baggy ones that won’t really stay on. I also went to Wal-Mart and bought another box to store/carry them in.

Back in the playroom, labeling the new box, and with gloves in three styles and four sizes spread all over the ping-pong table, I looked again up at the shelves surrounding me.  We store lots of an hand-me-down clothes for Andrew to grow into up there.  I scanned the marked boxes for the umpteenth time and my eyes landed on a U-Haul box (from our move 13+ years ago) that was neatly labeled “Misc Homeschool Books”  – in my dad’s handwriting!

Now, we do re-use boxes ad nauseum, but I can tell you that NO box in the playroom contains any homeschool books.  All our book are in the library, or in our office, or on the buffet, or on the dining room shelf, or any number of other places they’ve been set or left, but NOT in the playroom.  U-Haul boxes are really nice (to those of us who lust after storage in either the cardboard or plastic persuasions) and we had surely put something else in that one, but why on earth would anyone shelve a box with an old label out?!?  Either the box was empty, or else it contained something and whoever put it away labeled it and then shelved it with the label hidden.  Of course, there is one other logical possibility, but I’m sure that NO ONE in our family would EVER fill a box and shelve it without labeling it at all.

My curiosity piqued, I HAD to find out what was in that box.  I reached up and jiggled it, and it didn’t feel like it was full of clothes.  In fact, it felt kind of empty, with a roomy feel as I shook it.  I pulled it down.  Shock and awe for sure – someone had put it away without even folding shut the top flaps!  In the box sat the missing glove box, full of snow-white, sweet-smelling gloves, neatly clipped in pairs and color-coded by size.  Who’da thunk?

I was thrilled to have found the missing gloves and quickly reported their reappearance to those who were looking and praying with me, but I have not yet figured out WHO put the glove box inside another box and then shelved it so that only an eight-foot tall being could ever tell there were gloves in it, or WHY whoever it was did such a thing.  Was s/he trying to play a cruel trick on me?  Or maybe the spiders carried it up there at night?  Perhaps it’s just one of those hidden mysteries that will never be solved, but I can tell you that the gloves are now stored on a low shelf where I (and every one else in the family) can clearly see them at all times.

Hear ye!  Hear ye!  Jessica has completed both the SAT and the ACT and she will never take either ever again in her natural life.   Scores on the SAT are expected circa October 31, and ACT scores will arrive by postal mail in “five to eight weeks.”

Well, it turns out there was a reason why we were driving counter to all the rest of the traffic as we left Mt. Vernon:  we were going the wrong way!  We were actually headed straight into D.C. on a Friday night, instead of heading west OUT of D.C. to our fine abode in Sterling.  However, navigatrix cum laude found a three-state map of the Carolinas and Virginia in one of Katie’s door pockets, and ascertained that if we continued north of the George Washington Memorial Parkway, we would eventually hit something that would take us to I-495, which is the inner beltway loop.  We’d be coming in at the south part of the loop and could follow it west and then north to Highway 7.  7 goes west out of D.C., and from it we could take 28 south, find Old Ox Road and be home free, so to speak.

We followed that plan, found 7 west (which looks and acts like a freeway in those parts), and realized with the clock pushing 7:00 PM that we were both quite hungry.  Not to worry:  Scott had given me a generous meal allowance, and I decided that this was the night for us to splurge and enjoy our one non-fast-food dinner.  We weren’t aware of any Golden Corrals in the Greater D.C. metroplex, but Katie, who could subsist for a semester on chicken fingers, said that Italian sounded good, “like maybe. . . Olive Garden!”  That sounded good to me, too, and just then one of those nifty blue signs announced “FOOD NEXT EXIT.”

As we exited, I noticed that there were arrows indicating food to the right or the left.

Katie:  “Which way do you think we should turn?”

Me (scanning rapidly):  “Uh. . . how about left?”

She turned left and we started looking for food.  Usually, when one exits a freeway at a ramp announcing FOOD, one can see the Golden Arches or the KFC bucket or something like that just a few blocks from the freeway.  We did not see any such. In fact, the road we turned left onto (four-lane, divided, like all roads in northern Virginia) looked dark and neighborhood-ish.  However, we were optimistic.  Perhaps we’d have to travel a bit, and beyond the residential stuff, we’d come to the colorful neon stuff.  I said, “Let’s go about a mile.  If we don’t find any food by then, we can turn around and go back, because it said FOOD to the right, as well.”

We went a mile.  We couldn’t believe that there had been no food thus far; surely it would appear just over the next hill.  Lots of people how lived in the residential areas off this four-laner were coming home from work.  There were stop lights every few blocks.  Traffic was not zipping merrily along.  We were probably averaging 28.7 miles per hour, and the situation continued to look bleak, when what to my wondering eyes did appear, but a pair of gold arches, so high and so clear.

Neither of us wanted McDonald’s; we wanted REAL FOOD, but just past that lone fast food joint was a Safeway!  Aha.  The mystery solved at last.  There was FOOD to the left, but it wasn’t food-served-ready-to-eat.  It was the kind of food that you bought, took home, cooked and then ate.  Well.  7:30 was coming upon us and trust me, neither of us was about to cook that night!

We turned around and very slowly made our way back to the Highway 7 overpass.  Now that we were heading “to the right,” we were sure to find lots of restaurants just waiting to take my plastic.  At least we can claim to be eternally optimistic, because we drove three miles that direction before coming upon anything edible at all, and what we found at the three-miles-to-the-right point was a Giant, which is another supermarket.  So, my analysis had been correct.  In northern Virginia, the blue highway signs that say FOOD NEXT EXIT mean that a grocery store is located an unknown number of miles off the freeway at that exit.  Now you know.

Hungrier and somewhat discouraged, we plodded back to Highway 7 and got on in the westerly direction.  It continued to be a divided highway, but I guess we were entering yet another city.  (Cities, towns, villages, and incorporated areas are strung like pearls along Highway 7.  It’s basically one big long metro area, with occasional signs indicating that you have entered a different jurisdiction. )  It may have been Tyson’s Corner, and no, I don’t know what Tyson did there or which corner he did it on.

So, we’re tooling through Tyson’s Corner and it’s nighttime, and the area is like those places just a few blocks removed from downtown in major cities.  The buildings are high, but not skyscrapers.  It looks like downtown, but there’s no parking along the streets.  There are fancy boutique type shops in the ground-level floors of some of the taller buildings.  It’s a night life kind of place.  And suddenly on the far left corner, in the first floor of what looks like it might be a hotel, IS AN OLIVE GARDEN!!!  As I live and breathe.

The traffic dodging queen zipped into the left lane, whipped around a corner and into a parking garage and there we were.  It was quarter to eight, and neither of us could truly believe that after driving and steadily searching for food – any food! – for over an hour, we had stumbled upon the one restaurant Katie had wanted most.  Yes, we were in jeans and t-shirts, but yes, we strode right in like we owned the place and had a very nice meal.  And yes, Katie had chicken.  And cheesecake minus the raspberry sauce for dessert.

So, full and happy at last, we did continue our drive west, and after much more time we did come to our hotel, where we did play a grand game of Hail to the Chief which I lost miserably, and it was to all a good night, during which Katie slept ten hours and I slept something less than that.