Home again travel and pre-wedding Monday blues

Friday was the travel day. Up at 3 am in Edmonton; home by 3 pm, almost exactly 12 hrs. Driving would take 24-25 hrs so air travel is at least twice as fast as driving. In neither case do you get fed. It was your typical hurry up and wait. Everyone advised TPP to be at the airport quite early, a task made more difficult by the distance to the airport located it seems somewhere in BC. It actually only took 1 hr to check in, get a bag tagged and go through customs & immigration to end up in the good old USA airport lounge? Weird. Clearly though as the time progressed things were already getting further and further backed up, so this is one of those things where you either waste your time by getting there early or stand in lines. The former is quite preferable and you get time for breakfast and a newspaper. After sitting around for a couple of hours, and just before boarding, the "tard" sign went on, and TPP saw his way too narrow 56 min connection time in Dallas, which is like saying, you don't have enough time period, dwindle before his bleary eyes. The flight to their credit arrived in Dallas 30 mins early, but of course no gate was available, so the connection time continued to dwindle, but with a couple of 10-15 min walks, a short tram ride, and shazam, TPP made his flight home with 12 whole mins to spare! Who says that was a tight connection? Miss it and you're stuck in Dallas for another day. Breathing the same air as Ted Cruise for that long can be dangerous to your mental well-being. But home on time!
Saturday dawned with the knowledge that a week later 230 people would be descending upon our gardens to be present for the F1's wedding! If you ain't invited by now, well...sorry. The rest of the day and Sunday were a blur of errands and lawn mowing. Yes, a great deal of the Phactors' estate is in  gardens, but it's a big place and TPP has only mowed all the lawns in one day once or twice before. It's a 3.5+ hr job without bathroom stops, or coffee breaks, or distractions, or cocktails, or anything. It took all day, but what good exercise!  If the excellent food TPP ate in Edmonton put on any extra weight, it was certainly gone by now.
The wedding countdown continued and TPP awoke somewhat warm sweaty at 6:30 am; the ceiling fan was not turning. It's always on in the summer. Listen to the silence. Yes, the electricity was out. Not just us, or our particular neighborhood, but maybe the whole city because the university was out too (email warning in case you got science going on). You don't realize how much your life depends on electrons flowing until they don't. Ms. Phactor suggests going to the coffee shoppe for breakfast; one, the garage doors open electrically and the coffee shoppe won't have electricity either. And the bloody place was closed for remodeling anyways!! Moving into campout mode, the gas range was lit and the Italian espresso maker put to work while some milk heated. Melon needed no juice for its juice, and just as TPP was getting ready to fry some English muffins in butter, the juice came back on. Outage was only 1 hr.  English muffins are great fried, really.  Try it sometime, on camp outs preferably.  At any rate this has all been rather much. But at least the juice was back on for some professional house cleaners who were working on things and carpets and all.  TPP was working on weeds, but wackers take juice too. If this happened very often, the Phactors would be thinking about some back up generator system. Fortunately the neighborhood includes a big city hospital, which generates too much traffic, and other problems, but the power gets turned back on real quick. Now pass TPP a gin and tonic!  Quick!  Will he survive the week?  Stay tuned.