Fat umbrella

I've avoided a bulk of the rain by leaving for Los Angeles for Christmas, but mother nature is unleashing her vengeance on San Francisco tonight. I'd made plans to meet up with a friend that I hadn't seen in about three years, and flaking on one of those is kind of like flaking on a first date - you just don't do it, or you lose, forever! So as an acute sufferer of driving phobia, I decided to brave public transit... what, according to Google Maps, should take approximately 18 minutes from the sunset to the mission ended up taking an hour and 15. I really hate driving in the city that much.

Anyway, it turns out that (surprise, surprise) everyone and their momma owns a retractable black umbrella. Mine was gone after dinner, so the waiter gave me a spare umbrella that had been sitting in the back office for months. Apparently someone had left it there and never came back for it. It's one of those big bright football umbrellas... it's freaking amazing. I'm going to miss my sleek, compact umbrella (I sprang for the $11.99 at Walgreen's =( ), but big umbrellas are pretty amazing.

Is there a moral to this story? There's a couple, actually. I've just been so out of practice with my writing that most of it sounds like nonsense.

1. When you don't face your fears, you end up taking the long way home (in a bad way, not a Norah way).

2. Life pays. Be okay with letting go of status quo, and get rewarded with Mary Poppins life-size things.