Nevermind about Ellen

So, after I did all that bragging about going to see The Ellen Degeneres Show, I realized that if Dan and I are going to do any traveling this year, the only time both our schedules match up for the next six months is a short window of about five days at the beginning of May and the my trip to the Ellen Show is right in the middle of that window. That last sentence sort of sounds like Dan and I go "traveling" all the time and that the trip to Portland doesn't count as traveling. First of all, the trip to Portland counts for me, but Dan worked twelve-hour days most of the time we were there, so it doesn't really count for him.

And to further clarify, we're not really travelers even if I do go by Timid Tripper in the blogosphere. We love to plan trips. Dan likes to read maps and I like to read tour guide books, but most of our dreams have been gently euthanized by the realities of our income and the issue of time constraints either from things like writing a thesis, taking the bar, or limited paid vacation days.

There's also the fact that I'm a very cautious person, and thus the Timid bit. For our honeymoon we went to San Francisco and our exploration of the city was limited to those places we could get to by foot or on the open air trolley cars that basically run between Union Square and Pier 39. Turns out that Chinatown is only a short hike from Lombard Street. While we were there, Dan wanted to go to Haight Ashbury, but I nixed that because I was afraid that even if we got there by bus, we wouldn't be able to get back. (As Dan likes to point out, but did so unsuccessfully while we were in San Fran, if a bus takes you there, there will be another one to take you back.) I like to ease into things.

But yesterday the stars aligned and in a moment of temporary insanity, we decided to go traveling for a few days while my committee reads my thesis. (Please don't anyone tell me that's a bad idea because we've already bought the tickets for better or worse and they're non-refundable.) We settled on Honolulu because it's the most foreign place we can get to without passports and the airplane tickets were cheap.

But this means that I won't be at the taping of Ellen on May 9, and I can't help but wonder if I didn't jinx myself by bragging about it. So I'm definitely not bragging about our upcoming travels. In fact it's possible that we won't go, although we've already determined that we can't get our money back since we booked our hotel through one of those cheap-o internet services. I'm sure we'll have a good time, but for two people as anal as we are, this bit of spontaneity is probably more stress than we can handle. In the future, we'll just have to stick to our method of carefully planning and researching all major purchases. And lest this last bit sounds like whining, we are excited to go. But I think we both feel like maybe we should have taken more than twelve hours to think about this before we sent off our credit card number.