Blogalicious Lesson #1: When To Throw Up the Deuces

Alright, so the cute geek in the picture, that’s me. What am I doing you ask? Well, according to Chris Brown I’m throwing up the Deuces. Now that I’m 30, I have to use the Urban Dictionary, to truly understand what this means, so here: “when someone holds up two fingers symbolizing “peace” or when leaving an establishment, “deuces” is often said”.

After waking up at 3:00 am and waiting for my cab to come at 4:30 am, the hubby suggested I take a few “get the jitters out” pictures before I go. Cab comes at 4:34 am and he says to me, “Do you mind if I pick someone else up who is going to the airport?”. I say, “If it’s not far, sure.”. SO we are driving and talking and I’m thinking… hmmm this is taking a little longer than I hoped. He says, “you’ll be fine, we are 5 minutes away from the airport.”

So me and another gentleman get to the Pitt Greenville Airport at 5am for my 5:35 am flight. I’m seeing folks start to go through checkin, I’m smiling my way up to the check in counter that has a little sign on it “Closed. We will not be back until the flight departs.” CLOSED! WTF! No, no, no… I go to the security checking in and they look at those of us who are trying to get our check in tickets and say, “you needed to be here 5 minutes ago. They won’t print your tickets.”

At this point panic sets in, tears are coming, heart beat is racing and I haven’t a clue what to do. All I could see was the plane thowing up Deuces at me and ALL my planning, all my money spent flying out the window. FINALLY the airline folks come back to the front and say, “this is a horrible day to miss your flight, everything going to Miami is booked. We can try Standbye (that didn’t work) OR you can drive (1.5 hours) to Raleigh! Well… as God works in mysterious ways, the gentleman who I decided to get picked up, asked me if I wanted to take a taxi to Raleigh (I won’t tell you how many hundreds that was).

Now according to the Urban Dictionary, Throwing Up Deuces also means, “When you flip that middle finger, and that index finger follows. Giving the “peace out” when you’re done with a person…physically, mentally or spiritually.” This is what I was doing at that point (in my head) to PGV airport and US Airways as I was one of several passengers crying, loosing money, spending more money and scrambling trying to salvage our trips.

I wanted to cry my way back to bed, but I had to push forward. I got to Raleigh and hopped on a plane to Charlotte NC THEN hopped on another plane to West Palm Beach Florida, which is 2 hours away from South Beach, but my God was still working with me. Family picked me up at the airport and away we went until I was finally at the Conference at about 6pm that night.

Needless to say, I missed ALL of day 1 and I was too tired to party, BUT I did have dinner with several fabulous mommy bloggers (will post about them soon). That night, I found out folks were looking for me that day (BIG SMILE). The next two days, well I’ve got 30 days worth of information to share with you, SO YOU know that even missing day one I gained much from going to this event.

I say this ALL to say several lessons were learned:
Always checkin online and print out your tickets in advance if you can.
Always go to the airport super early EVEN if you live in a small town 15 minutes away from the airport (lol).
Never let a bad thing deter you from having a good day.
Never give up because something doesn’t go right, make the most of every moment that God Gives you.

Had I decided to go home that day, I would really have missed out. Had I looked at my life and said, ‘why do other folks always have it so much easier than me’, I would NOT have been able to see all the BLESSINGS and LOVE and KNOWLEDGE I was given during my time at Blogalicious 2010.

Life ain’t perfect ladies and gents, but hey.. sometimes you should throw up the deuces and sometimes you just gotta keep going.

For all 30 Blogalicious lessons learned, read my series of Blogalicious 2010 Adventures.