Thank You, Northwest

After waiting for the official word from the Mayor of New Orleans that they want people to stay away for a few more days, I called Northwest Airlines to inquire about rebooking the flight there that was scheduled for this Thursday, returning the following Monday. Although it's one day later than the official range of dates posted on their web site where free changes are allowed, the agent didn't balk, and after checking that there were seats available, rebooked us to travel one week later, on the 11, returning the 15th. No fees, no additional fare collection, no problem.

I then redid my hotel reservation, which was slightly complicated because I was using points on my Priority Club account. You can't edit the dates on such a reservation; you have to cancel the reservation, wait for the points to be redeposited into the account, and then reserve again when the points are available. Worried that the reward-night room might not be available at all after the system cycled, I initially booked a room at the ordinary rate. Somewhat to my surprise, by the time I finished that reservation, the 60K points had been redeposited in my account, so I then had to cancel that reservation and make a new one with the new dates.

My reservation/account history on that hotel is a mess -- I have a total of four reservations and three cancellations over a two-week period.

Finally, I logged into my company's vacation-tracking system to change the vacation days, which ended up with me having to call the IT help desk because it had been so long since the last time I accessed the PTO system that I'd forgotten my password and had to have it reset.

Still, the problems were relatively minor and we seem to be all set to make the New Orleans trip next week, when things should, we hope, have returned to some semblance of normal. And the hurricanes and tropical storms in the pipeline all appear to be either going somewhere else or too far away to be of concern.

I continue to think about what things would have been like if we'd been holding a Worldcon in New Orleans on the traditional dates, such as we did in 1988. *shudder*

Another Reason to Delay

My ear-eye problem continues to improve. I'm able to focus more often, and am not needing to use the eye-patch as often. Still, as the root cause is probably a problem with my inner ear, I'm just as happy to put off flying for another week.