Well, I’m finally back from Long Beach, and not a day too soon. As you’ll recall, at the beginning of the week I posted an itinerary on my blog for my trip to Long Beach for the October State PTA Board of Managers Meeting. Although some productive decisions were made, a vast number of factors combined together to make it the worst trip I have ever taken.

First of all, I’m sure that if you’ve been hearing the national news, you’ve heard about those fires down in Southern California? Those ones which has caused over $1 billion in damage, and which they suspect someone deliberately lit and they’re offering a $70,000 reward for information on? Well, I never saw the fires, but oh boy, did I see the smoke. When I landed on Wednesday afternoon in LAX, the blood-red sun was setting. On the Super Shuttle ride from LAX to Long Beach, the driver had the radio on and I learned everything that I needed to know (and then some) about the fires. But the smoke was everywhere.

And I was to become a victim of it. You’ll recall that I had been fighting a fight with my allergies? At the beginning of the week, I had practically conquered them to the point of an almost non-existent nuisance. But Thursday morning…BAM! My nose was clogging up worse than any kitchen sink you might imagine. During my two meetings on Thursday, I kept having to continuously blow my nose, making myself sound disgusting and building a big mess of tissues. I spent $10 of my own money on some Sudafed in the gift shop, but that didn’t help too much. Apparently, even though the whole hotel was air conditioned, that didn’t eliminate everything in the smoke, and that stuff was irritating me pretty badly.

Yesterday (Friday), I’m not sure if the smoke was clearer (the sunset Friday evening was yellow-orange instead of red), but my nose wasn’t quite as active as it had been on Thursday, but the congestion had moved into my throat, forcing me to buy Robitussin to deal with that. Of course, I got off to a bad start on Friday when I pulled something in my left leg in the morning when I was trying to turn off the alarm clock. It wasn’t broken or sprained, because (eventually) I could still walk on it, but it really hurt when I did it and still hurts a little bit as I’m typing this. However, I got through Friday, which included me reading an inspiration for the board meeting (which everyone loved), and by Noon, the meeting was over, I packed up my room and checked out. A group of us from State PTA got on a Super Shuttle to head back to LAX, and I got off at Terminal 6 for Virgin America.

When I got to the counter, my flight was listed as being on time, with a 4 PM departure scheduled. Great, so I checked in my bags, went through security, and then got myself some lunch at one of the restaurants. Then I got to my gate at about 3:00, and see a one-hour delay listed, the new scheduled departure is 5:00 PM. By the time 4 PM rolls around, another half hour has been added to the delay, making the new scheduled departure 5:30 PM. Apparently the word is that the plane hadn’t left San Francisco yet–it had had a flat tire. Later on, this story was revised to include engine trouble, so I’m not sure what the story was, but by the time 4:30 rolled around, the lady at the counter announced that the flight had been cancelled, and then the chaos started! Almost everyone got up and swarmed around the counter, and the lady at the counter kept trying to tell people to sit back down until she could figure out what to do, etc. I stayed sitting down, playing Solitaire on my computer, thinking that I would just wait and see what happened while many of the others tried to get themselves onto other flights.

The Virgin America folks tried to call other airlines to see if they could move us onto other flights heading into San Francisco, but apparently the other flights were completely full, including Virgin America’s next flight into San Francisco (which left at 6:45). By the time 6 PM rolled around, they announced that they would be getting another Virgin America plane to fly in, and it would be leaving for San Francisco between 10-10:30 PM. They told us to get into two lines, where we could either agree to be on the 10:30 PM plane, get a meal voucher, and we would get a $100 credit for future Virgin America flights, or else others could cancel and get on any Virgin America flight the next day, plus the $100 credit. Not having any other option, I consented to take the 10:30 flight and got my meal voucher. I laughed when I saw that my voucher was good for a whopping $10. You know this is an airport, right? PTA gives me $10 per diem for breakfast, and $25 for dinner. For dinner, I was able to get a hot dog combo dinner, which consisted of a hot dog, a small thing of fries, and a drink, and even then, that cost $12.

So I waited, and waited, and waited. I had not brought that much stuff with me to entertain myself–the few worksheets I had pulled from my school backpack to do on the plane were finished, I had lost 22 games in a row of computer Solitaire (I think I have a conspiracy theory against computer Solitaire), and I had walked within the halls of the gates so much I was completely bored of them. By 10 PM, I consented to watching the people who are supposed to help guide the plane into the gate play an improvised game of soccer, which they continued doing for half an hour, and I continued watching them for that long too.

The plane had been scheduled to depart at 10:30 PM, instead it pulled into the gate at 10:40 PM, and we watched as the disgruntled folks from San Francisco who had been messed up by the plane walked out into the terminal, and then waited for the plane to be cleaned, catered, refueled, etc. We finally boarded at 11 PM, and took off shortly afterwards, a full seven hours after the scheduled departure time. I spent a full nine hours in the LAX terminal yesterday, which meant that this trip beat out the previous long delay that I had suffered back in 2004 in Minneapolis (that plane had only left five hours late and kept my father and I at the terminal for seven and a half hours). We landed at SFO this morning at 12:30 AM, and I got home and to bed around 1:20 AM this morning.

I slept in, which is why I missed phpBB Weekly #036 this morning, and am not going to the peace march in San Francisco that I had been hoping to go to. I have not, as of yet, installed Leopard, but I’ll probably get started on that soon. And I am very glad that I wasn’t relying on making it to the Leopard launch event tomorrow. All in all, I am just very glad to be back home and away from all of the chaos that Long Beach caused this week.

Tags: fires, horrible, LAX, Long Beach, nasal, Personal, rant, sinus, smoke, trip, Virgin America

It’s been awhile since I’ve posted a blog entry, and that’s because I’ve been busy. Busy procrastinating. However, I thought that as long as I’m not allowed to go to sleep quite yet, and as long as Camino keeps deciding that every word I type is misspelled, which it never did before (strange), I thought that I’d blog about my experiences today.

You may know that I’ve had a nearly continuous bout against allergies since January. Strange, because I’ve virtually never had allergies before, but since January, allergies to SOMETHING have sprung up inside me, and nothing has been able to kick it. Not antihistemines, not Claritin (unless the definition of “Claritin clear” is the same as San Francisco on a foggy day), not Sudafed, and not even Flonase, which was prescribed to me a few months ago.

At first we had thought that my allergies were just the residual effects of a rather bad case of the flu that I had had in February. Then, as they persisted, we decided that allergy season must have been taking an unusually strong toll on me this year. But it’s October now, and so I’d say that allergy season has wrapped itself up awhile ago. But then, last Tuesday night, my allergies got so bad that they woke me up in the middle of the night and kept me up half the night blowing my nose. By the time I had to go to school, I had about 4 hours of sleep under my belt and was in no condition to be awake enough to go to school. I stayed home last Wednesday, and after sleeping till noon (literally), went to see the doctor. Allergies had won the first round, but for Round 2, I sought professional medical assistance.

This morning, I had an appointment with an Allergy Specialist, thanks to a conveniently-timed no school day, which proceeded to give me an allergy test. Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever had one of these allergy tests before, but they start by marking up both of your arms with numbers, and then proceed to prick these sections of your arms, which applies a small amount of a certain pathogen onto your skin. The feeling of this is essentially like being pricked with a sewing pin, but about 25-30 times within a minute. Yeah, not fun. They then send you outside to watch a movie about dealing with allergies in your home (dust mites in particular), to give 20 minutes for your poked-up arm to do its thing. The problem is that your arm starts to feel itchy, and these spots that were pricked start to see little bumps coming up, a few of them worse than the other ones. Luckily, once they finally re-examine your arm, they wipe off all the pathogens with a swab of alcohol, which helps it to feel better, and then measure the size of the bumps to determine how allergic you are to these particular symptoms.

It turns out that I’m really really allergic to dust mites (so I no longer have to say that I “might/mite” be allergic to them), which probably can explain why my worst allergies are in the morning and while I’m in my bedroom. I also have a relatively smaller allergy to cats and dogs, and am also slightly allergic to cockroaches. However, in practice, I’ve never really had much problem with cats or dogs, so I’m told that I’d probably be okay with making sure I wash my hands after petting. And I certainly hope that I’ll never have to meet a cockroach. However, I’m not allergic at all to pollen or mold, which throws all of our old theories out the already-opened window.

However, there is now a number of things that have to happen to help rectify my problems. First up, we have to do everything in our power to decimate the presence of dust mites in my room. That means, regularly wiping hard surface, regularly washing fabric surfaces and stuffed animals (that means all the stuff animals belonging to my brother, and also my phpBB Bertie Bear), putting hypo-allergenic covers on mattresses and pillows, and finding a dehumidifier to put in here. And also probably pulling up the rug in my room as well. In short, my bedroom will probably be getting excavated soon, with the target date probably set for the week of the 15th, when my brother is away at Outdoor Ed.

There’s more. I’ve now got to start doing regular nasal irrigation. I actually just finished doing this half an hour ago, and my, it was weird. Here’s kind of how it works. We got a kit at the pharmacy today which contains a bottle and a bunch of packets. We’re supposed to fill the bottle with lukewarm distilled water (or else water that has been boiled and cooled; apparently plain water will cause a burning feeling), and then mix in the powder in one of these packets into the bottle. Then, after dissolving the powder, I’m supposed to bend over a sink with my mouth open, hold the bottle with the cap on (the cap has a hole in the top) up to my nostril, and squeeze gently. The water then goes into my nostril and either comes out of the next nostril or out of my mouth. Yes, it feels weird, but it feels weirder coming out of my mouth than coming out of my other nostril. I’m supposed to keep doing this in one nostril until the bottle is almost half empty, and then in the other nostril the same way. I’m supposed to do this routine twice a day, although it will be quite interesting to see how well I manage with that. Oh, and then I’m not supposed to go to sleep for at least an hour afterwards for fear that the fluid could go down my throat and accidentally get swallowed, which I’m not supposed to do. That’s why I’m typing this blog entry right now instead of sleeping.

But then, after I do this nasal irrigation routine, I’m then supposed to do a spray per nostril of that Flonase nasal spray that I have lying around. Then, if my nose is still causing problems, I can take Sudafed as needed to help decongest it. However, I need to be sure I do the irrigation and the Flonase routinely, but even then, I probably won’t notice any improvement for two weeks. Wonderful.

But, with any luck, I won’t have to spend 2008 with constant nasal congestion as I have during 2007. And I do certainly hope that this stuff will work, because the next alternative would be, *gulp*, allergy shots, which would involve me getting a shot every week for a few years. Uh, yeah. I, ahem, do NOT want to have to do that.

In short, today, I’ve been given the arsenal to go after my allergies for Round 2, and am hoping to win this round, though it will be a long, and sure to be interesting process.

Tags: allergies, Claritin, congestion, doctor, dust mites, Flonase, irrigation, medicine, nasal, Personal, Sudafed