Crawling out of the jetlagged, sleep-deprivation-induced mental crater of the past few days, I’m realizing I’ve got a little housekeeping to do from this last trip. For starters, there are the pictures. Yeah, I’ve posted some of them to the blog, but now that I’m back in The Land of Bandwidth, I’ve posted the full set up to Picasaweb:
[Note to Google: when I go to http://picasaweb.google.com, please don’t take me to Google Plus+ photos and then ask if I’d like to go back to PicasaWeb? Really – if I wanted G+, I would have typed it, you know? It’s like getting coffee for the millionth time after asking for tea – you start to wonder if the person you’re talking with is really all there.]
Ahem. Anyhow. I did get home, on schedule, with no crazy surprises from airlines. There was the girl ahead of me in Heathrow security who looked like she’d gotten the “do”/”do not” pack instructions backwards. Took about 20 minutes – I kid you not – for the screener to go through her steamer trunk-sized carry on, pulling out large bottles of shampoo and perfume packed willy-nilly amid dirty undergarments. My bag had already gone through the detecto-machine behind hers, so I was stuck there, as was the rest of this particular security line, with nothing to do but wait and watch as he made an example of her failure to adhere to the 100ml-of-liquids-in-a-plastic-baggie rule. Slowly, painstakingly slowly, he worked his way to the bottom of the bag, holding up and examining each undergarment as if in a slow-motion archeological excavation before setting it in the tray. At one point he came up with a handful of ornate gold-plated cigarette lighters. He paused, shook his head wordlessly and set them down in a separate tray.
But hey – I wasn’t in a hurry. I had a five hour layover, to be followed by 10 hours crammed into Seat 40K of BA 285, coming back over the Arctic Circle to get home. Treated myself to a steak and ale pie with carrots and mash, but skipped the pint. I’m a total lightweight, and tipsy at 5 a.m. on a Friday morning in Heathrow didn’t qualify as my idea of a good time. Finished my dinner (it can be whatever time you want it to be in an airport), wandered around a bit and wrote another blog post. Went online to find a Frederick Pohl quotation I was after for the post and discovered that I’d already written that post – six years ago. O – whatever would we do without the internet?
Gave up on the post and watched Syriana on my phone for a little comic relief. Not.
Followed by a flight that went on and on and on and on and on. And on a bit more. I know I’ve been on longer flights, but I swear, I don’t think I’ve ever been so restless and claustrophobic. But we landed. And Devon picked me up. And I’m home now.
