My Twenty-Something Quasi-Soap

Ok, so October rolled around and the heat finally broke (kinda) and things were really quiet out in the tropics. I won't say that I was lulled into a false sense of security, but I'll admit that I wasn't as vigilant about checking on the weather as I originally was. I mean, it got really boring to go onto the NHC website and see nothing but boring little disturbances that fizzled out quickly, or, even worse (or better), nothing. So of course I didn't think anything of yet another area #1 out somewhere in the Atlantic that had, as the website said, little chance of development. Conversation with my sister yesterday: Sis: There's a riptide warning issued for the beaches today. Me: Well, makes sense, it's really windy out today. Sis: They said it's due to TD #(I don't remember what number it was). Me: TD # What? When the hell did that happen? Sis: My bad...it's actually a tropical storm now. Tropical Storm Noel. Me: Well, where's it headed? Sis: Umm...

I have a love/hate relationship with air travel, as most people do nowadays. It's bad enough that I got violated on my airfare because I had to fly on short notice (nearly twice as much as I would have paid if I bought my ticket an extra week in advance). But has anyone else experienced the same type of wretchedness that comes with flying today? In the 2 years after 9/11 that I had to travel by air, I was "randomly searched" by airport security on nearly half of my flights - the locations of such occurences were the following: -Kansas City -St. Louis (on the connecting flight from KCI to LaGuardia) -Ft. Lauderdale -London Honestly...the only one that made sense was London. And that was the most blatant example of racial profiling that I had been subjected to - only brown people were pulled aside before getting on that plane. After the searches died down (have not been subjected to one since London), I then had to deal with delays. The one (and only) time I flew out of Phi...