Livin' Off Love

Tuesday morning we were up at butt-crack o'thirty, (ok, ok, so it was 445am - still, it was dark outside!) and had to get ready to head to Pensacola to spend the day at the Veteran's hospital.
We tried pulling up the address with our TomTom, but it didn't recongize the area - so needless to say, we need to update our maps this weekend. Godo thing the VA sent us detailed instructions on how to get there, or we surely would have gotten lost!
Getting to Pensacola isn't hard, we live a mile from the interstate, and all you do is get on and go. Boom. But, this was going to take us downtown Pensacola, and we had no idea where we were going - heck, we don't know anything about Pensacola except that we drove through it when we moved here in October!
Rich's appointment was at 8am, and the appointment sheet said we had to be there thirty minutes early, so that'd be 730am, right? Well I told him we had to be there at 730am because of the early arrival - and all he heard through guy hearing was '730am' and 'thrity minutes early' and he computed that to us getting there at 7am. I didn't know thats what he was going for until we were half way there. *lol*
After manuevering our way through downtown, we pulled up to a newly built VA clinic and it was empty - what'd you expect for that early? We decided to go ahead and go in instead of sitting in the car for over an hour - because we got there a little after 630am!
We went to the "Delta" area - yep, you know your involved with military when stations are named 'alpha', 'delta', and 'foxtrot' and such. Noone was there to check us in yet, so we sat down in chairs that seemed comfortable... at first.
Later some younger people came in who worked there, and we had to listen to them talk about clubbing and "dude, did you see that girl?", and things of the like. All I wanted to tell them was to shut up and check us in.
But I didn't.
Finally at 730am someone came to check us in - but then we had 3 other guys try to cut Rich in line to check in first. This might not have mattered if they were older Vets, but these guys were our age. Screw you! We've been waiting since 6-freakin'-30!
I wasn't allowed to go back with him for his physicals, so I staye dupfront and read until my eyes went crossed, my stomach was eating its internal lining and my tailbone had gone numb. Finally Rich came out about 2 hours later to say he had to go across the hall for labs and x-rays.
Thankfully those didn't take long, but we still had about 5 hours to kill. So we went to the car so I could put in my contacts; put up his medcial/Army records (they are so heavy!) and we chilled in the car for a little bit and decided that venturing out in an area we had no idea about wasn't a good idea, so we stayed there. We went back inside to have lunch in their little deli area, and had hamburgers and fries.
After that, gues what? 4+ hours to kill. Rich talked to the person at check-in to see if he could get in early, but they said he probably coulnd't, but they'd put his name down incase. Rich people watched (he later told me about some older guy on the balcony above looking down at a girl a few chairs away in a low cut top. pervert. lol), read out-dated magazines and twittled his thumbs. I, on the other hand, tried to get some sleep.
Remember the chairs? After being in them all day, they're not so comfortable anymore. I turned from hip to hip trying to find a nice way to lean, and I think I might have gotten around an hour of sleep in there, which is better than nothing. But that's when I started noticing I was getting sore in my port area.
At around 145pm Rich was called back for his psych-eval, and I was prepared for a long wait. He came out at 210pm and was done. Seriously?! Not that I'm complaining because I didn't have to wait anymore, but for hte VA not to take more time to talk to it's soldiers about their mental issues, especially sinc Rich got out of the Army for PTSD, blew my mind.
He did say that the guy he got was uber nice, his dad was a Vietnam Vet, and after Rich told him some stuff, he said he wanted to help him get the best he could. So that's nice to know.
So we were done.

On our way home, we were crossing the Pensacola bridge and noticed all the cars stopped. We figured it was a nasty wreck and hunkered down for a long wait, which ended up being around 30 minutes.

After arriving home and takeing off my jeans and bra, we could see that my stomach was pretty swollen and very, very sore. I spent the next day and half with a heating pad on my stomach to ease the discomfort. Next time I know that if we're going to be sitting for 10+ hours to get up and move around a lot more. Live and learn.

Me before we ate. I look a bit tired, especially with no makeup.

Richard after he placed our order.
Feeeeeed me!

And the traffic jam....

Going onto the Pensacola bridge