Murphy's Law: the one that supersedes all others. Even Alito can't overturn it.

We left the house on Cape Cod with great reluctance this morning. It was another glorious day.

Much to our surprise, we sailed through on the normally torturously slow drive to Boston in 2½ hours--an hour less than usual on a Saturday noon. I ditched the car with the rental agency, and we got a taxi to the hotel, as my wife's flight out to Paris (no direct flights from Boston to Düsseldorf) didn't leave until 10:55 PM. Or so we thought.

We relaxed in the hotel (I cashed in some points) for a couple of hours, went into town and strolled around, and then had dinner at Legal Seafood, one of our favorite places.

We went back to the hotel for dessert and then I accompanied my wife to Logan airport in a taxi. When we got to the Air France counter, there was a long line, and no one was checking in their baggage. Not a good sign. I went up to an agent who was animatedly explaining something in Spanish to some frustrated passengers. I understood what she said in Spanish, but I was hoping my Spanish had suddenly gotten rusty, as I didn't like what I thought I had heard. Unfortunately, my Spanish is just fine.

The plane has been cancelled. They had another one available, but it was of a type that the pilots on call were not trained to fly. The ones that flew it in today from Paris had not had the required 24 hours' rest between intercontinental flights, and so could not fly it back to Paris. There is a flight tomorrow morning out to London, but it gets in too late to catch a connection to Düsseldorf out of Heathrow, and there isn't time to get from Heathrow to Stanstead to get the last Air Berlin flight to Düsseldorf.

Sooooooooooooooo, we explained that my wife HAD to be at work on Monday morning in Germany, and that they HAD to book her, exceptionally, on another airline, and in business class, s'il vous plaît (I'm Air France platinum--it holds a certain sway on rare occasions). She is now book on Continental (I give that a one in ten chance of departing on time) to Newark and from there on an early Lufthansa flight nonstop to Düsseldorf, getting in at 6:00 AM on Monday. She won't be what one could reasonably call well-rested for her day at the office, but she'll be there.

All this is assuming nothing else goes wrong. I give that one a 50/50..........

She got through the chemo and radiation OK, but there's no pill that takes away the stress
of not having had a night before you start work on the morning. But if she doesn't show up
at her office on Monday morning, she's fired--that's the same in Germany as in the States.