Just call me Annie Oakley!

Dear friends, so sorry I haven't written in a while. After Sunday's bout with a restless night (full of nightmares that I had been kidnapped), I slept like a dog, rug, rock, or other object on Monday night... This left me to do all of my packing for the trip to Tucson for business (flight left Wednesday morning) on Tuesday night. Which, if you know me well, you know I did not do. I'm horrible about packing - I don't do it until the day of...even if my flight is leaving at the crack of dawn.

Anyway, yesterday I woke up at 4 am to do said packing, dropped the pooch off at a boarding place, drove to the airport, ended up parking MUCH farther away than what I thought, stood in line for an hour to get my tickets (seriously? It's a Wednesday morning), stood in line for almost an hour to get frisked by the TSA agents, and walked to my gate which was the most remote section of B-gate...so remote that it was a little add-on that I didn't know the airport HAD. I got there in just enough time to board the plane. Oh - wait, I did go to the bookshop and bought a new book. No, I'm not done reading "Eat, Pray, Love" but since it seems to help me at the weirdest times, I kinda' want to draw that book out. And I also brought the book that my mom and I are reading "A New Earth: Discovering Your Life's Purpose" which in my opinion so far is a bunch of hooey.

I get to Tucson, get picked up by Dave, the outside sales rep that I'll be traveling with, and we wait for my bags. We wait and wait and wait. Until finally some guy comes up to me and asks my last name. Upon giving my answer, he immediately says "yeah, your bag is not coming." I considered crying, screaming, throwing the small Asian person that was standing next to me, but since I had the audience of Dave, decided to react like an adult and sighed instead. The thing is that we would be traveling around and I would actually end up staying in a small town two hours outside of Tucson. He assured me that there was a good possibility that it would arrive that night.

Dave and I start driving and I have to stop here and say kudos for me for not falling asleep. I am horrible about that - I mean, my parents would put me in a car when I was a kid and drive around if they couldn't get me to sleep. Yes, it's almost as if I am watching a movie at home. There were a couple of times that I ALMOST fell asleep, but luckily I was able to hold it together.

Donned with a hard hat and safety glasses (man, I looked H-O-T!) we went to the mines. It was good...but definitely boring (can you TELL I need to be in a different job?). We went back to the hotel and Dave said, "Why don't we squeeze off a couple?" Uh, what? Flashes of all the things that he *could* mean went through my head. None of them sounded like a good idea. But it turns out he meant that we could shoot guns. LONG story short, we'd had several conversations about this because this is something he enjoys and something I've never done. We drove to a very remote part of the desert (wasn't too hard...Safford, AZ is TINY!) and after he gave me a short lesson, we started shooting at plastic bottles. The first clip (i.e. the sliding thingy that you see people shove into the bottom of their guns - it holds 10 bullets), I hit the bottles FOUR times! Woohoo! I shot two more rounds and Dave said that I did well. YAY! It was a lot more fun than what I thought it was.

We went to dinner with two of his old friends from high school and then we went back to the hotel and I found that my luggage was there. I've never been so happy not to shop at Wal-Mart in my entire life. :)