Sleepless in San Francisco (and Cleveland)

Monday night was Halloween, and my two boys collected enough candy to feed a village!

On Tuesday afternoon, I boarded an airplane bound for San Francisco. I was attending a two-day course at Google,, Unfortunately, forty-eight hours is not enough for my body to acclimatize to the three hour time zone difference. Each night I would fall asleep around midnight (3am EST) and wake up 4 hours later. But other than the reduced sleep, my two day California trip was really good. Google fed us well, and the hotel we stayed at served up a magnificent multi-course breakfast, which included cereals, french toast, bacon, egg, sausages, fresh fruit, yogurt, cheeses and pastries!! On Thursday after the course, my colleague and I decided to kill some time by watching a movie, before making our way back to the airport for our midnight flight back. We watched the British comedy, Johnny English : Reborn, which was quite amusing, and quite silly at times. But it sure was better than sitting in San Francisco's rush hour traffic! After the movie, we had dinner at a Mediterranean restaurant, and then drove the rental car back to the airport. Our flight was packed, and I was "lucky" enough to have a woman who had a severe cold sit next to me. She is also didn't seem to want to sleep on the flight (like everyone else) and kept her overhead reading light on for the majority of the 4 hour flight to Houston. Then to top it off, the two tattoo-covered women sitting behind me, decided to crack jokes, and their cackling woke me (and everyone with earshot) up at around 4am. Needless to say, I wasn't a happy camper.... This flight was scheduled to land at 6am, and we had to catch the connecting flight to Cleveland at 6:45am. Much to my dismay, our flight landed 15 minutes late, and being at the back of the plane meant that it would take at least 15 minutes for me to get into the terminal. As soon as I got into the terminal, I started racing to the next flight, and my blood pressure was raised when I heard the announcement over the PA "Will passenger McCarthy please go immediately to gate E12 as this is the final boarding call!" To make a long story short, my colleague and I made it onto the Cleveland flight, and this was probably the best flight out the four we had during this trip. We finally landed in Cleveland just after 10am on Friday. When I got home I was physically exhausted, and that afternoon, I went for a three hour afternoon nap! While I was on the West Coast, Liesel and Josh were also "sleepless" back home. The reason for this was our new roof was installed from Monday to Wednesday. This meant that when it was time for Josh's afternoon nap, there would be some form of noise directly above his room, be it removing the old shingles, installing the ice-guard or nailing down the new shingles! The good news is that our house now has a brand new roof, although the weather has been so good, the roof hasn't had a chance to be tested by rain yet.