Monday

Sunday night I packed my little travel bag and prepared for my trip to NY...again. I've been to NY 10 times now and have only seen the city once. I made a promise to Jenny that I wouldn't tour the city because she has not been able to go once. So far the promise has been easy to keep because my offices there are in White Plains about an hour from the city. Not easy to get there.

Anyhonk, so there I was Monday morning taking Bobby to pre-school. the teacher was late coming back to her house to let all the kids in so her front yard had about 10 kids all playing there. When the teacher arrived I got into my car to leave and the car wouldn't start. I began to panic because a car service was picking me up in 20 minutes to go to the airport. A friend had jumper cables and offered to help out. He brought his car up, I connected the cables when smoke started filling up everywhere. Imagine 10 kids running around stopping dead in their tracks and starting to "ooooh" and "awwww'. Then imagine all of their mothers starting to panic and ask them to move back and stay away. As the smoke got progressively worse, the tone of the mothers voices got more serious and worried. At this point the cables were starting to melt and combined with the smoke it looked as though a fire was quickly about to happen. I tried to remove the cables from my car's battery but they were so hot I couldn't touch them. One of the mothers brought me a towel so I wrapped it around the cables and pulled them off. I let the towel and cables fall to the ground. At that exact moment, the towel flared up and a small fire started. Remember this is all in the driveway of Bobby's teacher. Nice. I quickly stomped the tiny flames out and the matter was over...well I thought it was. I looked at my car and realized the plastic that was on the cables had melted black streaks into my front bumper. Take a look. I'm thrilled with the result. My car has battle wounds now.



I now had worse problems. The battery was fried. Apparently in my rush to get home I connected the cables backwards which is why that happened. I know I know. Not smart. I called AAA and they arrive about 2 hours later with a battery.

As a quick tangent, we drove a boy home from the pre-school every day. His mom saw the smoke and small fire and promptly arranged a carpool with another mom which we found out about before she called to tell us. This was probably the best thing that came out of this ordeal. No more carpooling.

However as I mentioned earlier, the car service showed up at my house as I was battling the smoke and flames and they still charged me the $118 bucks even though I couldn't go. And even better, the flight I was rushing to get to, was cancelled. Then the second flight I re booked on was cancelled. Then, the last flight to NY was a 4pm flight from LAX to JFK. With the new battery, the car was fine and looked mean with its new found battle scars so Jenny loaded the kids and drove me out there only to find the flight was delayed 4 hours. During this whole ordeal Jenny had made it very clear this was a sign that I should not go to NY. I still went. The two have NOTHING to do with each other. I finally made it to my hotel room in NY at 5:15am. My first meeting started at 8:30am. You do the math.

Good times. I go to London next.....