Hanna and The Hand
Dateline: Pacific Ocean. Philippine Sea, to be exact. Somewhere between Guam and Saipan. I will say closer to Guam, as I can still get a smattering of a signal from KUAM-TV Channel 8 from there…long story short, we are at sea and I’m not supposed to be here.
As I write this, Pamela, my beloved wife and editor, is back at our farm nursing the broken hand she suffered a couple of weeks back and had surgically repaired on Friday. I told her that I didn’t think it a good idea to train our horses to give high-fives, but did she listen? Noooooo. The first time one of them gets it right, they break her hand in three places.
It could have been worse, I guess. They could have been wearing shoes. Ouch!
The point is, with only one working appendage utilizing an opposable thumb, she has been unable to sufficiently carry out the daily duties of a horse rancher. Fortunately, in my absence, she has been duly and ably aided by our good friends Lily, Tracy, and Organic Producer Extraordinaire Phil. They have all pitched in to keep things running and have had the good sense to avoid exchanging equestrian extremity-slapping of any kind, be it high-fives or terrorist fist bumps or whatever.
Despite all this assistance, I nevertheless felt it my duty to be home to help Pamela in her time of need. Following an exchange of e-mails and phone calls to my boss in Falls Church, it was arranged that I would come home early from my tour. The catch was that I would have to train my senior operator to take over my job, as there were no communications managers available on such short notice. As the hardest part of my job is figuring out the optimum time of day in which to nap, I was agreeable to this.
So, at 7:00AM the next morning, I proceeded to begin training my senior operator in all the tasks, operations and special skills needed to take over my post. At 7:05, training completed, we headed down to breakfast. I told him to meet me again at 4:00PM to fill out the timesheet and, if I wasn’t there, he was to come and get me in my stateroom. I told him to knock extra hard, as I am a very sound sleeper.
The plan was for a relief operator to arrive in Guam on Sunday. I was to pick her up, take her to the launch, notify the newly trained communications manager of her pending arrival to the ship, and then turn around and head back to the hotel to cool my heels until Monday morning, when my flight was scheduled to take me back to the States.
Now, as I have already told you that I am on a ship that is currently en route to Saipan, you know that none of this happened. It can all be blamed on a certain T.S. Hanna, not to be confused with T.S. Eliot or, for that matter, T.S. I Love You. Oh, wait a minute, that last one is supposed to be P.S. I Love You. A Beatles song. Not one of their best, in my opinion. But hey, it was early in their career, and besides, Paul McCartney was the primary writer and I always preferred Lennon’s work…and this has absolutely nothing to do with what I was talking about, does it?
T.S. Hanna, aka Hurricane Hanna before landfall and high pressure systems made an honest woman out of her, managed to dump approximately 3,2176 feet of rain up and down the east coast just as the relief operator was supposed to be boarding a plane in Norfolk, which is inconveniently located on that very same coast. Houses, cars and towns fell victim to the flood waters of this terrible storm. Her flight was delayed. Everything always happens to me.
Now, under normal circumstances, this would be but a minor problem. Flight delayed? No problem…except the delay would cause her to miss the connecting flight from Houston to Hawaii to Guam…which only goes out once per day…and we were leaving Guam first thing Monday morning for Saipan…which is normally an 8-hour sail…except we have to participate in an exercise…and will not get there until Thursday.
In other words, not normal. As it now stands, by the time this hits the net, I may still be in Saipan reading it, instead of my cozy office at home in Appomattox, like I had hoped. But at least I should be home in time for the weekend…provided Hurricane Ike doesn’t throw a spanner into the works.
The Moral of The Story: Don’t high-five your horses until you’re sure your spouse can get a flight home. Feel free to share that advice with your children.
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