One of those mornings

That's my 757 to the right (just parked). Look at the parade of snow removal equipment on the horizon.

This morning was one of those mornings...We got into Indy late b/c we had to deice in Milwaukee last night and they closed the runway for 20 minutes to plow it just as we were ready to depart, but were still able to grab a short hubturn nap. Things were looking ok for the outbound from Indy at 4:00 this morning and we actually got our fuel before scheduled push time. The paperwork all arrived and the snow had left us alone so we would not need to deice. We pushed about 10 minutes late and my first officer made some comment to the effect of "this ain't so bad," to which I replied "DON'T SAY THAT!" Sure enough, as we tried to start the left engine, the pushback crew started yelling over the headset to cut the air (the starter uses bleed air from the APU to turn the engine). We did so and they pulled us back into our gate. About 5 maintenance guys came running up, and they reported that we had just put on a Fourth of July fireworks show with sparks flying out of the engine cowling. I gave my FO a venomous look...this was all his fault! So, these guys replaced the starter in about 25 minutes, which is a world record, especially in the snow that had begun falling. All the maintenance paperwork got filled out, we closed up and tried it again. No problem this time, but now we had to deice. We were late enough that we got our choice of the nearest runway and proceeded on our way to Milwaukee. As we neared MKE, my FO said we still weren't that late. Grrr, when will he ever learn? As we began our initial descent, approach informed us that it was time to plow the runway again, so it would be closed for 20 minutes. Thankfully, we had plenty of fuel, but listened to a US Air flight that was only just going to able to wait around b/c they did not have sufficient reserves. Misery is having almost enough gas! Finally we landed in a blowing snowstorm, couldn't see to taxi, eventually found the gate and shutdown. Phew, get me to the hotel. But noooo, the van was not there. Over the course of the next hour we called three times, each time assured it would arrive in the next ten minutes. The hell of it was that we had to wait in the hangar, standing on a very cold concrete floor that caused my feet to go numb as it was the only place where we could keep and eye on the parking lot through the window w/o actually being out in the blowing snow. I finally got into bed at 8:00 this morning. And, oh yeah, I almost forgot, when I got to my room, it was dirty (bed unmade, not serviced, etc). As the title of the blog says, "livin' the dream."