Well, we got into Syracuse about 12:30am Friday morning, after a somewhat “interesting” landing. Syracuse had been closed due to low clouds and fog up until about 20 minutes before our arrival. As we circled around to the east side of town to land in the usual westerly direction, we were flying through dense clouds. When we finally broke through the bottom of the cloud deck, we were passing over I-481, which is just over 2 miles from the end of the runway, we were abnormally low, I would estimate about 400 feet about the ground…. Next thing we knew, the pilot was throttling up the engines to maintain altitude as we flew level over Northern Blvd, then descended onto the end of the runway. As we slowed down, you could hear the tires skidding on the well soaked runway, but we made a safe landing and taxied to the gate without incident. But, it was an interesting landing…
When we got down to baggage claim, our luggage was no where to be found… It seems that United was being proactive, and loaded our luggage on an earlier flight from Chicago to Syracuse that was added to the schedule after we booked our trip. Because of the bad weather in Syracuse, this earlier flight was diverted to Albany, and took our luggage with it. The flight was supposed to return to Syracuse sometime during the night, and United delivered our luggage to the house about 4:45pm on Friday…
But, when we finally got home about 2:15am, we found our cat, Goofy, to be having trouble breathing, and was not in that good of condition. So, into the car we go, back to Syracuse to the Emergency Vet ER. Had the cat checked out, fluid build up from heart disease that had been getting worse over the past few months. Goofy is 19 years old, but up until the past year had been in great health. So they drained some of the fluids and wanted us to get him to our regular vet for a followup ASAP. Got back home at 6:00am, slept for a couple hours, headed to our vet about 10:00am, left Goofy for some tests and went back home to sleep some more. Picked him up about 5:00pm, and of course United called while on the road about dropping off our luggage, so we told them to just leave them on the porch… Got home about 6:00pm, brought our luggage into the house and went back to sleep.
Unfortunately, Goofy appears to be suffering from advanced heart disease as well as what appears to be metastasized lung cancer from the nasal tumor we discovered in August. We are just trying to keep him comfortable and happy as we decide on a course of action for the future. Goofy is still eating and moving around, so he is doing alright currently…
Today has been a very sleepy day, we did not even get up and eat breakfast until nearly noon, and then slept most of the afternoon. The effects of jet lag coming from 6 hours to the west are bad enough, but add the lack of sleep from dealing with Goofy on top of that, and we are both exhausted.
