Tulsa, OK

James and I went to his employer’s annual dinner downtown at the convention center Saturday night. Apparently the convention center is the only place in town big enough to hold them all. 6500 people plus one each, although, of course not everyone makes it to the dinner. There are doctors and nurses and other hospital personnel who had to work, and other people who just aren’t comfortable or actively dislike those large events. I love the chance to dress up for a change, and I can tolerate the huge crowd of people as long as James is with me. ( Social anxiety sucks btw)

It was a lovely dinner and everyone looked great. Our evening had a wrench thrown in the works from the very beginning though. We were a little late leaving the house. James kept forgetting stuff. At one point we were a couple of blocks from the house and he realized he didn’t have his cigarettes. So we turned around and headed back, and half a block from the house, there were his smokes laying in the middle of the street. Apparently he had left them on the roof of the car, and they made it that far before falling off the car.

Then, when we got downtown, all the parking had been taken. So we went back to Houston to circle around to the  parking garage hoping to find an empty spot there. Instead, the car dies right before we can pull on to Houston, and won’t restart. Fortunately, (and whoever thought there would be anything fortunate about car trouble or road work) Houston is under construction right there at the Civic Center. So we just pushed the car into the contruction zone and left it while we went to dinner and tried to find someone to give us a jump afterwards.

Dinner was nice, but it would have been a lot better if we hadn’t been worried about the car being towed off before we could get back to it. It didn’t but it also didn’t start when some friends tried to give us a jump-start on their way home. I had to call Uncle Frank to come save us as usual. And he did. He came out at 9:30 to fix our car so we could get home. Apparently there was a wire loose on the battery that was keeping the attempts to jump start the car from working. Once Frank reattached that wire the car started right up and we drove home.

Next year, we leave early and I wear flats.