Velcrometer
Throwing stuff at the internet to see what sticks
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M. Giant's Velcrometer Throwing stuff at the internet to see what sticks |
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Sunday, October 19, 2003 Blogging from 30,000 Feet. Sorta. What is it about flying to Austin from Minneapolis, anyway? Why do they have to make it so hard? As longtime readers may recall, in January Trash and I went to Austin by way of Rochester, Minnesota, back to Minneapolis, and thence to Memphis, Tennessee before ever seeing the Lone Star State. This time, my triumphant return to the Texas capitol for JournalCon required a preliminary road trip to Eau Claire, Wisconsin (accompanied by Trash, who would be driving on to Milwaukee to hang with CorpKitten and Chao), roughly a hundred miles from home, where I would again fly back to Minneapolis and thence to Austin-Bergstrom. No, I couldn’t just show up at the Minneapolis airport and get on the plane there. We tried that last time, and received for our pains a brief but highly unpleasant stay at Guantanamo. This itinerary is preferable in several ways, however. For instance, my initial flight was at 11:30 AM, instead of what our boys in the service call Oh-God hours, so I had a nice view of the ground below me as the 36-seat (counting flight crew) Buddy Holly Airlines puddle-jumper conveyed me back to my home city over the route I’d traveled the previous night – except six hundred feet higher and nearly ten miles per hour faster than my car. Then there was the double marathon hike from my arrival gate to the departure gate. I once again had to hoof it from one far corner of the terminal to the other, but at least I got to stay on the same side, as opposed to going kitty-corner. You wouldn’t think that Concourse B and Concourse G would be quite so far apart, if for instance you pictured the word “big” – look how close they are there. The word “brogan-destroying” would be more accurate. Now that I‘m on my final leg of my trip, waiting this long-hand for later posting, I can’t complain. I’m in an exit row, that I have my side of the aisle of all to myself, and no one is behind me so I can put my seat back without damning myself to hell. For a gentleman of my size, it’s the difference between flying to Austin in comfort and flying to Austin in a Fed-X envelope. I had my side of the row to myself on the Eau Claire-Minneapolis flight, too, but that doesn’t really count, because a) there was only 1 seat on my side of the row anyway, and b) on a soda can with wings, none of them are exit rows, unless, God-forbid, suddenly they all are. On the downside, there were a couple of interesting people on the plane last time we went to Austin. Deanna Carter rode with us from Minneapolis to Memphis. I considered having my picture taken with her just so I could post it to my site, just like Uncle Bob, but she was waylaid in the Memphis airport by a bunch of idiots who insisted on having their pictures taken with her. Jerks. Leave the poor woman alone. The bigger gap in the passenger manifest today is the one represented by the absence of my wife, Trash. It’s all I can do to not look over at the empty seat next to me and start crying like a toddler with a hangnail. But since there’s no stranger with a handily absorbent shoulder there I am restraining myself. I only hope the folks at JournalCon will be able to do the same. She’s the one they’re probably more excited to meet. Today’s best search phrase: “Peehole violation.” See, this is one of the problems with Google. They ignore terms like “of” and “with,” which sometimes makes it difficult to narrow the search to exactly what you want. I think the originator of the “peehole violation” search should write a strongly worded letter to Google to exactly that effect/ posted by M. Giant 10:19 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:
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