qatarperegrine | In da burgh

I'm here! The trip was really not that bad: it's shorter than in the other direction, and my layovers were all exactly the perfect length. So far my only difficulty has been that my house key wouldn't go in the lock. I rang the doorbell of our neighbor who has a key, but they weren't home. Then I called our housesitter but couldn't get him at home or on his cell. Then I panicked a little and, let's face it, sniffled a bit. (I'm really tired, OK?) But I finally found the neighbors, and their key creaked into the lock and turned. I spent the rest of the afternoon sorting mail and wandering around our house in a daze. (Has the house always been this small? Were our plates always that color? Did I really wear skirts that short?)

Now I'm across the street at Panera, which has FREE WIRELESS. Booyah! I am foreseeing many, many more bowls of black bean soup in my future.

Also, I seem to have (a) forgotten every chord except D on the guitar, and (b) returned all the guitar books I had that had chord charts. And while my Songs of Protest book has many, many songs with two or three chords, I don't know any song that you can sing with just a D chord. :-) But, hah hah, now I can download a chord chart and then open it at home.

I'm going to stop writing now, because I have a feeling I'm a smidgen on the jetlagged and incoherent side. But yay, I'm here! In the bus on the way home I wrote down all kinds of observations about things I'd forgotten about the U.S., many of which are things I've never directly talked about in Qatar, so I'll have to write those up sometime. But I left the list at home. And I'm not plugged in, so I should watch my battery. Also, my black bean soup is getting cold.

Edit: Other sucky thing about flying in today -- on the bus on the way into town I passed the gay pride parade. I missed it by hours! :-( If I'd known it was this weekend I'd have been tempted to fly in a day earlier....