On the road home

Our meetings ended an hour or so early, so I headed on back to Nashville. I brought along my CD case, so I was able to listen to tunes on the 90 minute drive each direction — Eurythmics’ Greatest Hits on the way down, Dr. Demento’s 20th Anniversary 2-disc set on the way back. Much better than sorting through endless sports talk and country music radio.

The trip up was uneventful, and checking in was … uneventful! Checked in, no red lights, no knowingly suspicious looks from counter agents, no DHS goon squad to drag me away, no … no hassle. Dunno if I got “checked through” when I checked in the other day, or if my Evil Twin was captured, or if security at the United kiosks in Nashville aren’t hooked up to Central CENTRAL Intelligence, or what. Just know it was kind of nice.

Wandered through the gift shoppe past the Dozen Ugliest Shot Glasses Ever, not to mention many bad t-shirts. Managed to find a fun cookbook for Margie, a glowing wand for Kitten, and some earphones for me.

No Wi-Fi at Nashville’s airport, but at least there are plenty of power outlets. And, fortunately, I have an offline blog client. I had been using XREWare’s MTClient, but with my reinstall I’ve been able to get RandyRant’s SharpMT working again, and I find myself preferring it (with a couple of provisos) to MTClient. Both are good tools, and without one or the other I’d have been unable to blog during this trip.

It occurs to me that I’d like to start bringing a camera with me on trips like this. There are some fun things I get to see as I travel, and it would be kind of keen to share those with Margie (and others).

And that’s about it for now. I’ll see if something else of interest happens later on.

Define “something” …

The ride up to O’Hare was uneventful. O’Hare was a strange time warp of things which should be qiuck being slow, things which I wanted to be slow being quick.

We hit the ground on time, taxied over toward the gate … and stopped.

“Well, folks, this is the flight deck. As is becoming all too common here at O’Hare, we’re here on the ground on time, but our gate is still occupied. In fact, we even got in a few minutes early. We’ll update you as we get more word.”

About twenty minutes later, they finally rolled us forward to a gate. And, as is always the case at O’Hare, it was always at least a concourse away from where my connection was. At least for me it was only a difference between the B gates and C gates — which are in the same terminal (2), but a separate building. Yes, it’s confusing, which makes turning the wrong direction a not-uncommon circumstance.

By the time I got to the gate home, it was about 15 minutes to load, which meant (a) nothing to eat (fortunately I’d nibbled in Nashville), and (b) no time to recharge the laptop battery (I’ve been having fun playing SimGolf of late). Rush, rush, rush, onto the plane …

… roll out onto the tarmac …

… queue up …

… sit …

… sit …

… “Ladies and gentlemen, from the flight deck, the tower’s telling us about a large storm front moving through over Chicago, so we’re going to be sitting here on the ground until it passes. I’ll update you as we hear more.”

“Ladies and gentlemen, while we’re waiting, we’ll play a movie for you …”

So at least I got to see Shrek 2 (which was quite worth seeing, albeit from a bad angle to the little LCD screen). Then we left.

No, that’s what I mean — the entire movie ran before the storm had passed. And, to be fair, there was about 10-15 minutes of very high plane-rocking winds and near-white-out-conditions-pounding rain, so I’m glad we were on the ground for that part.

So, a bit over two hours after our take-off time, we actually took off. Fortunately we were near the front of the line. There were at least 11 planes lined up behind us at the top of the runway.

I snoozed for at least part of the time. I was at the bulkhead aisle, so I had plenty of leg room. Alas, by this time, my tail bone was killing me, which made finding a comfortable spot difficult.

And we got on the ground and I slogged over to the car and drove home and checked my office e-mail (in case my 7:30a phonecon had been cancelled — it hadn’t, but I begged off), And hit the sack around 2:15a.

Other random observations:

• “BLASTING ZONE AHEAD” is not a comforting highway construction sign to see. Especially when followed by “TURN OFF TWO-WAY RADIOS AND CELLULAR TELEPHONES.”
• Why does United not have its Chicago hub set up with WiFi? Dolts.
• The following new drugs are likely to be approved for sale over the next year: Vytorin, Cymbalta, Arcoxia, Exanta, Lyrica. Looks like someone has been hitting the “Fantasy Kingdom Random Name Generator” too often …

Good to be home.