Jubilate!

I had a lousy day today. A pair of jeans that I've been patching to extend their life finally ripped in an irreparable and totally immodest way and I can't afford to replace them for another 11 days, K decided that she's an oenophile at heart and therefore must communicate entirely in a complicated sets of whines and the combination of double utilities from two houses last month and much less work on my part has created an unwelcome crisis in the bank account department. And once I got sufficiently upset about all of those things, everything started to bother me. Since we're still only half-unpacked and K is a miniature force of entropy, there was plenty in my surroundings to drive me insane.

But! I was smart enough to call Fiddlefern (ed. note: best friend from college) tonight. And in the course of our usual conversation wherein we lament how far apart we are these days and try to figure out when in the next six months we might be able to travel to see each other, we were looking at the Skybus website. Skybus is a budget airline that offers one-way fares as low as $10 between various medium sized cities, Columbus (where Fiddlefern lives now) being one of their hubs. And as of yesterday, Wilmington, as in the Wilmington only an hour away from Philly, is one of their destinations! Suddenly we've gone from being a full day's drive from each other to being a short, extremely cheap airplane flight away, so cheap that it would actually be cheaper than driving. Yippee!

This wonderful new development will also be a big boon for us when we're traveling to the Midwest in general. It had occurred to me before that we could catch a cheap Skybus flight to Columbus and then rent a car to drive the rest of the way to wherever we're going. It would eliminate a day of travelling and be cheaper than normal airplane flights. But when the nearest airport Skybus flew out of before was north of New York City, it didn't seem worth it. Now, it definitely is. We wouldn't necessarily be able to do it too often, but this could make going home for a 4-day weekend feasible.