The wife is currently en route to Atlanta to visit her sister and mother to take part in my sister-in-law's wedding pre-season (ie, shopping for dresses and doing other sorts of wedding planning stuff).
The little lady, bless her heart, selected the most inexpensive flight leaving today from Pittsburgh for Atlanta. It left at 6:45 am. Which meant she had to be at the airport at 4:45 am. Which meant we had to leave the house at 4:00 am. Which mean we had to get up at 3:00 am. THREE O' CLOCK AM. Which is basically the middle of the night.
The cloud's silver lining came, however, when I received the following brief text message from the wife just after she had boarded her plane (I added the punctuation and capitalization--those are tricky to do in text messages). This single sentence made waking up at 3 am worth it.
One guy got on [the plane and] said, "This is like a Greyhound bus on wheels."
Like the one in this picture?
It reminds me of a family friend, who, after arriving in the quaint Midwestern city of Chicago, Illinois (which is little more than a suburb of Indianapolis, really) remarked, "This city is almost as great as Columbus, Ohio!" Soon after making this comment, unfortunately, this friend, apparently unfamiliar with the operating protocols for revolving doors, became trapped in the circular entrance for one of the many stores along the Magnificent Mile. As if Chicago, recognizing and scorning its own inferiority to Columbus, Ohio, felt the need to exact petty revenge on the soul who dared speak such hurtful things.
If it meant reliably getting comments like these, I would gladly wake up at 3am every day (and then I would probably go back to sleep).
___________________________
Note added in proof: as I'm about to click "publish post", I just received another text message from the little lady. This is what it said (again, punctuation and capitalization contributed by me):
I made it. I love you.
This message is even better than the first.
