It's a Festivius Miracle!

As bad luck would have it, my darling Hapa Boy had to travel the week before Christmas, when outside the house, not a creature was stirring except oh, an unexpected Seattle blizzard dropping twelve inches of snow over our sleeping heads.

Are you getting this? A blizzard. In Seattle. It doesn't snow here. It snows in Santa Fe, which is, as a matter of fact, one of the reasons I moved away. Yes, it's all white and fluffy and Santa's Coming and reindeer and jingle-jingle until there's a pound of the stuff on your windshield every morning and tracking in the house, and making you slip slide out of every side street. Dear Readers, I do not like snow. I do not like shoveling it. I do not like removing the tiny snow balls that embed themselves in my dog's paws. I do not like the icy pathways. I do not like not wearing my suede boots from November through March. I have never and will never ski or snowboard, as it combines the two things I am most afraid of - height and speed - into one terrifying package. I don't get snowboarding. You go up, you go down. In between, you're cold and wet and scared. It's all fun and games until someone gets decapitated.

But I digress.

Here, a major storm, in Los Angeles and then San Francisco, my darling Hapa Boy. It would seem that the Seattle-Tacoma Airport did not have much in the way of cleared runways or de-icing equipment. Shocker, huh? You wouldn't believe the irritated population of Seattle, complaining that Seattle was not prepared for a snow storm. We're also not prepared for serpents to fall from the sky. Both are equally likely, people.

Overbooked flights were delayed and delayed and then canceled. (It would have been much worse to have been stranded at Sea-tac. Trust me on this one.) His Sunday arrival looked like it would be Boxer Day (also, his birthday.) More snow was coming. And Christmas! (I know, I know. I'm Jewish. Shut up. ;)

But I am nothing if not determined. I am dogged by nature, unless it is about digging out my car from a foot of snow, in which case I am content to give up. Moments before Hapa Boy was trying to decide whether to bunk down in San Francisco or the Oakland La Quinta Motel, I decided to re-check the flights on Orbitz/Expedia/Zippydodo if anything had opened up. And lo and behold, a space on a 9:30pm flight out of San Francisco. Yay!

So I should have my Hapa Boy back tonight, making the cold a little warmer. The moral of this story is never let your boyfriend out of your sight.

Wait, that's not the moral.

The moral of this story is all's well that ends well. Except when it costs you an extra $500 and a mad dash from airport to airport and another mad dash down the LA freeways on the Sunday before Christmas and a lot of assorted aggravation and bad food and whining from your girlfriend capped by an icy I-5 drive home at midnight.

Still, it's not every guy that would do the above to come home as quickly as possible - because he missed me. I feel pretty lucky, all in all.

Happy Holidays and God bless everyone. No exceptions. *

UPDATE: Hapa Boy has landed in Seattle. We will skip the Airing of Grievances, and progress to Feats of Strength - including trudging through the sludgy snow.

*Not even Alaska Airlines.