So an e-mail to a select few people Monday night contained the following:

I would love to keep entertaining you all with grammatical exploits, but it's getting late here on the Left Coast and I am getting tired. And I have to fly out in the morning—assuming none of the airports I'll be visiting (Seattle, Houston, and Little Rock) are closed. Pray for me that I don't get stuck in Houston, because that's in Texas.

Apparently I asked the wrong people to pray for me (oh, the burden of unrighteous roommates), or they didn't, in fact, pray for me (oh, the burden of unrighteous roommates), because I did, in fact, get stuck in Houston, for 17 hours and counting, with at least another 2 and possibly 8 remaining. (The alternative theory for this predicament—that this is compensation for yesterday's inwardly condescending, smug, and altogether uncharitable attitude toward other stuck travelers—is not currently under consideration.) Highlights of this (yet ongoing) ordeal include:

• A connection missed by less than five minutes ("I'm supposed to be on that plane." "It's gone." "What do you mean, GONE?")
• The somewhat disheartening prospect of an overnight stay in Houston ("I'll put you on the next flight. It leaves at 7:10 TOMORROW MORNING") and its associated freak-out (thanks, LH and AK, for being good friends)
• The even more disheartening realization that the luggage with all my clothes and toiletries did, in fact, make it to Little Rock last night
• The Shuttle for the Lost and Abandoned (as the delightfully cheerful man who welcomed me thereon called it)
• A ghetto motel with a bathtub plug improvised of plastic film and a washcloth (I wanted to relax, da[ng]it!)
• A 4:30 AM wake-up call that occurred at 3:15 AM (who needs more than four hours of sleep anyway?)
• A frigid 5:00 AM ride to the airport accompanied by freezing rain, "Eye of the Tiger", and other power ballads 
• Two hours spent waiting for a 7:10 AM flight that was canceled, without warning or explanation, at 7:05
• The truly disheartening prospect of at least six and possibly twelve more hours in Houston (I'm on standby for the 1:15—someone other than my roommates, please pray that I make it onto that flight)
• Aimless, semi-catatonic wandering through Terminal B (part of a completely futile search for a comfortable place to nap)

Enjoying this opportunity to develop patience and effective stress-handling techniques,
S.

(The following was written at 1:20, but I unfortunately didn't get the e-mail sent before I was out of range of the wireless Internet access.)

Update: Ladies and gentlemen, we have a real, honest-to-goodness BOARDING PASS!

(Hopefully this boarding pass will prove more than a tangible representation of exercises in futility; as I am actually on a [very cold] bus at the moment, awaiting deportation to a plane somewhere out on the tarmac, my hopes are high.)

Another hypothesis for today's predicament, heretofore unmentioned because I wasn't sure it was valid (though I was certainly hoping so), has to do with my Theory of Finite Quantities—the idea being that there are finite quantities of elements such as luck in the world, and that thus one person's good fortune reduces that of others, at least to a certain degree. In other words, I got stuck in Houston for 19 hours because AK was using all the luck, but since (warning: spoiler to follow) one of the newest admittees to Harvard Business School now has some VERY good news (I almost jumped out of my seat right there in the terminal but didn't want to inadvertently use my laptop as a projectile), I don't begrudge him a Texas ordeal or two. And he quit using all of the luck in time for me to make this flight, which is very benevolent of him.

And now the bus is moving, presumably toward an airplane, so I gotta go. Loves to all yous guyses!

Aaaaaaand the saga continues. My body is here (thanks to the prayers of JR and maybe JH), my computer is here, my backpack is here, and one of my checked bags is here... The other, despite having visited Little Rock during my absence (according to the testimony of at least one Continental employee who all but swears she not only saw but personally handled it), apparently has heretofore unsuspected abandonment/anger management issues and hence either went looking for me, maybe in Florida (my mom's guess), or just ran away, maybe to Beirut (more likely, in my opinion). Continental has vowed to find the suitcase whatever its present locale and disposition and return it to me, which I, for one, find indescribably—INDESCRIBABLY—reassuring given the events of the past 24 hours.

Props to all you pray-ers (at least, you effective ones),

S. (who was waving her valid boarding pass a few hours ago with an ecstatic vigor usually reserved for finders of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory-style golden tickets ["I got one! I got one!"])