weekend from hell

So I had the plan to go to New Jersey this weekend to visit with some friends that I hadn't seen in a while. It was going to be a short trip though, going out on Friday night after work and coming back Saturday night because I had to be back home to take care of the pooch since Brian was working a double on Saturday. Anyway, I negotiated to get out of work early on Friday afternoon to try to get ahead of as much traffic as possible. The best laid plans, right? I pulled out of my driveway to head to Jerz at 4:30 on Friday afternoon. Had no trouble on the Northern State, Grand Central or even the Throgs. The Cross Bronx was slow, but at least moving. I called Peggy at 6:00 to tell her that I was just about to cross the GWB. We had plans to go out for dinner to belatedly celebrate our birthdays, so I wanted to give her a heads up as to my arrival. It took me 2 hours and 15 minutes to get to Parsippany from the George Washington Bridge...a trip that would take 30-45 minutes tops on an average day. Traffic was a crawl between Hackensack and Paterson...it took me an hour to go three exits. All I could think was that it was a good thing I didn't have to pee. Aside from trying to stay awake (I get extremely bored and sleepy in traffic, even when I'm behind the wheel), I found myself wishing for a navigation system. I don't know my way through Bergen County much beyond its major arteries (4, 17, 80, 3), and I don't know much of Paterson beyond Corrado's Family Market. I usually have pretty good navigational instincts, for lack of a better term...a talent I seem to retain even when drunk and in completely unfamiliar areas (there's a story there about me, some Absolut shots at an out-of-state wedding, and directing my cousin back to the hotel without a map after a wrong turn). Anyway, I wasn't feeling particularly brave on Friday night to try to negiotiate myself through Paterson, so I sat there, and sat there, and sat there. By the time I got past the construction, I put the pedal to the metal and drove at 80 mph the rest of the way, and was so happy to be moving that I would have accepted a speeding ticket with a smile. The rest of Friday and Saturday were okay, though....got to see Peggy & Megan, then went up to Lisa's on Saturday morning, and stopped in at Carol's on the way back home. I mercifully didn't have any traffic heading back to the island on Saturday night. I was supposed to go to an all day crop yesterday with my friend Anne and a couple of her friends. But keeping my weekend up to par, I woke up with a vicious migraine, one that I was finally able to shake around 6:00 last night. I woke up this morning, glad to be headache-free. Got myself dressed and ready for work and go out to the driveway, where I have a flat tire. Now one of my tires is already patched because at the end of September, I had a nail in a tire, so automatically I assume that I wore the patch out (hey, I'm a non-gearhead girl, I don't have much of a clue where things like this are concerned). After taking the tire and jack out of my trunk and realizing that I don't know how to work my jack (why aren't the damn things universal?), I head back in the house and call AAA. Within 15 minutes, there was a man in my driveway changing my tire. Imagine my surprise when he pulls the tire off the car and points out the culprit, another nail. Twice in two months. Let's just say I'm not happy right now. Oh, and I hate driving on a donut....I feel like I've got hydraulics in my car....like I should be rolling in my 6-4 with Snoop and Dr. Dre. So I have to get my tire patched asap, to at least hold me over until I buy a couple of new tires, which I had planned to do in the next few weeks anyway, but now seems to make the need more urgent. I hope everyone had better weekends than me!