Charm Citizen

I realized from listening to the top local headlines today, which were about events that occurred yesterday or are ongoing, both had some direct impact on my life. First, our longtime veterinarian was shot by his brother in some sort of domestic dispute that resulted in our poor vet being shot in the leg. I’m unsure of his prognosis. How saved our cat Moo Shu’s life about 20 years ago and now sees our cat Shadow. I hope he makes a full recovery. It was also a scary experience for the neighboring elementary school which had to be put on lockdown on the first day of school. We actually lived on that block and adjacent block for more than 10 years before moving to our current home.

The other to local news story this morning was a continuation of yesterday’s story (and blog post) about no air conditioning in Baltimore City Schools. As I talked about yesterday, our oldest daughter is home today because the air conditioning is broken in the middle school. It appears we are very close to both local news stories today.

Rough Start to the School Year – In addition to our oldest daughter being home due to no AC, our youngest daughter is home today too due to illness. She woke up with a fever. Sadly, I wasn’t there to help out since I was already at the airport for a day trip to Long Island for work. My husband John is juggling a bored middle schooler, a sick 2nd grader, and a drop off and pick up schedule for an anxious 4th grader. Thank goodness for daddy!

Unexpected Delays – I knew my quick day trip to Long Island from Baltimore was too good to be true. It started out lovely when we arrived at tiny little Islip Airport after a 44 minute flight. I got to enjoy lunch in downtown Huntington and we completed all our work-related activities as planned. About 2 hours before our flight out of Islip, we got word that our flight was canceled. We had to scramble quickly to grab a seat on the Long Island Rail Road at a nearby station so we could get a seat on Amtrak back to BWI before it got too late. The best part, I suppose, was that we had about an hour to hit the daylight once we arrived at Penn Station in NYC. I was also very impressed by the Moynihan Train Hall and all its shops, which I do t think existed the last time I took Amtrak. My colleague and I hit a little diner, called the SkyLight Diner, around 8th Avenue and 32nd Street for dinner. I had a salad with avocado, grapefruit, vegetarian black bean chili (a house specialty), and a baked potato. It was delicious and fast. We then shuffled back to the terminal to catch our train back to Baltimore and there was enough time to grab a vegan banana bread at a little coffee shop at the train station. We had to take the train all the way back to BWI airport to get our cars. That part was a little painful because I live closer to Baltimore Penn Station and it feels like it adds extra time on to an already long travel day.