It's been a complicated last few weeks. Having gone though a lot with our poor departed pup, we flew down to Miami on Thursday evening, having removed whatever guilt we might have had about going on vacation immediately after putting our dog to sleep. In face, despite its Monty Pythonesque overtones, it seemed the perfect thing to do. Especially when the song playing on the radio as we left the vet was "I Wanna Be Sedated" (really truly).

We had made this reservation weeks ago, when it felt like we just needed to get away, since any travel around winter break seemed unpromising. We had no idea at the time the Art Basel, one of the largest modern art shows in the world, was going on at the same time. Fortunately, we planned to stay on Key Biscayne, miles from the well-known and feared craziness. This turned out to be a particularly fortuitous choice. The hotel here is very nice and we'd been here before, so were able to slip into a familiar routine with a minimum of fuss.

The weather was fantastic- high of around 80 degrees, no humidity, and a light breeze. Perfect for lying around all day, which is what we did.

After somewhat guiltily thinking to myself, this has been great, but another day would be really nice, I checked in online and got boarding passes and headed out to the beach for a last hour or so. As I swung by the bar, I saw the Eagles game on TV, and saw Megatron get up with a face mask full of snow. I checked in on our flight status to found that, lo and behold, it had been cancelled. Not only that, but the Monday flights, even Miami to Philly via Seattle, were sold out.

So as it turned out, we got 2 extra days in Miami, and thanks to a snow day and a late opening, I only missed two classes. The only downside was spending at total of 6 hours on hold waiting to rebook my flight. Not an exaggeration, though not 6 consecutive. It was 4 calls, 1 hour, an hour and 40 minutes, 2 hours and 20 minutes, and finally another hour. But it worked out fine, great in fact.

That being said, let me just note here that dealing with Miami airport is an absolute horror show. My advice is to never, ever rent a car at that airport, even if it costs twice as much to rent one wherever you are staying. We got to the airport 2 hours prior to the flight, a flight where we were booked first class and therefore had the priority security line, and still just barely made it to the gate in time, after dealing with the various modes of transport and sheer distance in getting from the rental car return to the gate. Ugh.

But home we got, and now it's time to move on to post-dog (for the moment- we are definitely getting another one) life.