Yesterday I stupidly got into an argument with my wife in the car about being late for Conner’s appointment because we went to get groceries at Samsclub. I voiced my opinion that we wouldn’t have time between leaving the dentist office and getting to Conner’s next appointment at Heartspring. My wife was convinced that we could get the grocery shopping done in the 30 minutes we had spare so I agreed to go get the groceries which of course took 45 minutes despite the ‘turbo’ shop. We were already a couple of minutes late for the appointment when we left the Samsclub parking lot; I’m a fast driver but I can’t make time travel backwards and of course the stupid slow ass Kansan drivers slowed me down even further. We arrived for the appointment 10 minutes late; which is a lot when it’s only a 30 minute therapy session. My wife doesn’t have any concept of how long things take which inevitably means that she is chronically late for just about everything including work half the time. Anyway, this argument led to me getting out of the car and starting to walk home; which back home in the UK wouldn’t be a problem but in Kansas; it’s often a very long walk; some seven miles in 98°F, I walked about four of those miles before having to cave in and call my wife to pick me up as I was severely dehydrated, getting a bad headache and feeling faint so I took shelter under some trees near Wichita Collegiate School to wait for my wife. It didn’t help that the crosswalk signals weren’t working (I waited for five minutes and the “green man” never appeared) on 21st and 13th streets so had to walk an additional mile to find alternative crossings. I got home nearly 2 hours after starting my walk, which would have taken about 12 minutes when driving! A valuable lesson was learned yesterday, storming out when away from home is a bad idea as there’s large areas of nothing between civilisation and the stifling heat and humidity is an absolute killer, a massive difference in every way to back home in the UK!
My wife is understandably still upset with me but she’ll get over it, I do have somewhat of a non-violent temper which is exacerbated by my frustration about the employment situation here in Kansas plus being late (and other’s being late) for appointments and meetings drives me crazy. Don’t even start me on doctors offices; you turn up 10 minutes early for your appointment and you’ll be lucky if you get seen within 30 minutes of the appointment. What’s the point of making appointments if you are not going to see people at the time booked, the patients have schedules too; just adds to the unacceptably poor customer service I have come to expect in Kansas!
My son Conner finished his final day at Camp SSTAR today and inevitably he was really upset; he really liked it at camp because they allowed one hour of “choice” time which he choose computer time and played on miniclip.com plus 30 minutes of computer lab. The camp is only four hours per day; 40% of the day taken up by sitting at a computer is not what I was hoping to achieve in this camp; I was hoping for more social interaction so he could make friends but it seems that we are no better off as all Conner talks about when we ask what happened at camp is miniclip.com and Age of Speed (which is a game at minicliip.com). I don’t want to send him back next year as it costs $300 for a week, obviously that’s something the wife and I need to discuss but he hasn’t got anything out of it from what I can see. He could have stayed at home and played computer games.
To top things off there were multiple tornado warnings in effect which meant we had to spend two hours in the storm shelter for a relatively calm storm; at least in the South East Wichita area, it got dark and some heavy rain came with a little thunder and lightning but no tornado on the ground in the immediate vicinity despite three separate tornado warnings all around the city.