Rearranged Time and the Big Cyprus

Friday afternoon, I wrote this chunk as a Facebook status:

"I have just rearranged my dermatologist app't for a week later than the original Monday appointment, so that I could be in the sun this week-end and have time for my skin to return to a lighter, more dermatologist approved color for an appointment the last week of March. Yes, I will use sunscreen, but I will I reapply it religiously? Past behavior suggests that I will not."

But the week-end did not go exactly as planned. 

I thought that Sunday would be different.  I thought I'd need to spend time grading extra credit essays from my students, but very few of them elected to do it.  I thought I'd need to spend time submitting grades, but the portal was down all week-end.

My spouse had planned to take a motorcycle trip to Marco Island with his brother.  But his brother's bike was still in the shop, so he couldn't go.  My spouse tried to decide whether or not to go on his own.  I suggested that we take a smaller trip together.  We decided to go on the Tamiami Trail to the Big Cypress visitor's center that's halfway across the state.

The last time I went was on a school field trip in mid-September.  I remember the road as being deserted.  It was not deserted yesterday.

I didn't remember all the airboat ride places on the side of the road--hurrah for the Native Americans who have figured out how to give tourists what they want--but it made for a congested feel.

We never made it to the visitor's center, but we had a nice ride nonetheless.  I always love the vistas of the Everglades, that look of prairies.  We saw a lot of birds, but I didn't see any alligators like my spouse did.  Like last week, we saw a lot of motorcycles on the road.

We turned around because we didn't want to risk running out of gas and because I thought the portal would be up, and I would need to submit grades.  In retrospect, we could have gotten gas and kept going.  Oh well.

We stopped at a place that I thought might be Mexican or Japanese:  it was called Wajiro's, and it had a Mexican hat in neon.  No, it was a Cuban place.  We had great pork dishes, grilled plantains, some boring steamed veggies, some potatoes.  I had the best lemonaid ever, with crushed ice for a slushie-like approach, and the rim of the glass rolled in sugar.

When we filled up with gas before the restaurant, my spouse asked me if I had a credit card.  I said, "I have nothing but a chapstick and my good looks.  That won't get us very far."  But it did get me a lemonaid.

Did the restaurant mean to give us a free lemonaid?  Because of language barriers, we couldn't clarify.  We decided to just accept it for what it was--an unexpected treat, in a day of lots of unexpected treats.

We got home with enough time to relax in the pool.  It's still chilly--78 degrees--but after a hot ride, it was great to unwind there. 

Today I'm taking the day off because some of my friends who are public school teachers have this week off for Spring Break, and we want to get together.  I thought they had Spring Break next week, so I originally took the wrong Monday off.  Luckily, it's easy enough to reverse.

But it's symptomatic of this whole week-end, where plans changed suddenly, and I found myself having to shift gears, which I think takes me longer than other people.  I get an idea fixed in my mind about how a time period will go, and it's hard for me to adapt to changes.

Some of the things I thought I would finish yesterday, I will need to finish today:  grades, posts to my Living Lutheran editor, poem prompts to the Create in Me folks.  Some of the things I thought I might do yesterday turned out to be overly ambitious, like our taxes.  But I did get all the paperwork organized, which is much of the battle.

And there will be time for lunch with friends today, a treat I thought I would have a week from today, but today is actually a better day to take off.  The knowledge of some unstructured time today gave me what I needed to suggest a shorter Sunday trip, a treat of a trip. 

I'm sorry that my spouse missed the longer trip, because he was looking for it, but I'm glad that we had a chance to go together.  I'm glad for rearranged time.