"We should go early."

I say this because I know us, I know how we work. We're procrastinators. We come from a long line of them, it's in our genes. If it was a crime, we would have been tossed overboard years ago. So, I suggest a sound suggestion. You would think after a little over two decades of giving semi-decent advice people would listen to me. We've been in this situation before, and even those times, we should have gone early. I remember, and I apply it to current events. See, even I can learn from the past.

But...nooooo.

So we go, with fifteen minutes to get there, and a very vague idea of where we're going. We have a class. It's downtown. We should be able to find it right? We're smart, modern, capable women who can cook and run our own businesses. Finding this place should be no problem, we have pretty decent direction sense.

Of course, lying to yourself only hurts you.

So we start off, over the hills and through the woods, and after a few wrong turns, snappy dialogue (such as "Which street is that street after?" "Nevermind that, what street is this?") and about four trips down the same street we had just gotten off of, we found the parking garage.

I have recessive blonde genes, I get them from her.

So, we park, on the second level because everyone loves walking up and down slanted pavement in the dark, and clamber out of the car into the freezing wind. I stood squinting out of the little holes in the wall at the rain outside. There were guys doing construction out there on that sixty million feet high skeleton of a building in that stuff, it would suck to fall.

"Now, where are we going?"

How should I know? I'm watching the construction workers. Of course, I don't say this outloud. Instead I say something more sane and less stalkerish, "Maybe we should ask for directions?" I pointed in the general direction of the meter mai..person who was probably going to end up giving us a ticket later in the evening.

I tell her we're looking for the TAD Center and she wanders over to ask directions. She took just long enough for me to stop feeling my face.

"She said it's four blocks back that way."

"You sure? They said to park in this parking garage because it's close. Four blocks isn't close." I say this not because I'm lazy, but because it's true. Where I live, a block, maybe two, is close. Four blocks is the beginnings of a mile, and therefore deemed 'not close'. If you need to go four blocks over, you do the sane thing, and park near where you need to go, so four blocks becomes one block, and then where you need to go becomes close. Four blocks in this weather is asking for a cold that will follow you around all season long.

"Well, let's go look anyway."

Fine. I keep my mouth shut and off we go. See, I can keep quiet. Four blocks in the typical Oregon spring weather of rain that hasn't let up in three days and wicked wind, makes for a very cold four blocks. Eventually we make it four blocks and I stop and turn around. We're going in the wrong direction, I could have told you that three blocks ago.

"It's not down here, we were misinformed, I think it's a conspiracy."

"You think?"

"You did park awfully well, maybe they were jealous of your talented parking skills and decided to get back at us by sending us all the way down here in hopes that we would get lost."

"It's four blocks."

"That's all it takes."

So we walk back, and about a block away from the parking garage we run into the same meter person as before. Again we ask for directions, and this time she points in a different way. "You want to go four blocks that way, then two down."

Like hell.

So we thank her, and by now the slightly bemused expression I've been carrying around is permanently frozen to my face. We get back to the parking garage and give up. It's fifteen after, we're late. Might as well reschedule and try and find it another time, maybe even leave early next time.

I stare aimlessly out of the window as we pull out of the parking garage. My face hurts thanks to the wind and the annoying bruises, and as we turn left out of the garage I kick the glove compartment.

"Well...damnit!"

Poking her in the arm I point to my window. "It's right the hell there!" Right there, in the parking garage building, not more then two hundred feet from where we were parked were the lovely offices we had spent the last twenty minutes looking for.

Now that we had found it we were far too late to go. So I rescheduled but I didn't tell them why we didn't make it.

It was far, far too stupid.