Viva Vegas music

Welcome to Lost Wages from PHSChemGuy on 8tracks Radio.

Let's listen to some music in honor of our recent trip to Las Vegas.

Thoughts on a Spring Break trip

I think this is the first Spring Break trip that The Girl and I have taken in a half dozen years, maybe longer.

It's also the first chance we've really had because Hamilton and Princeton (or UC and Princeton) have had consistently different spring breaks for most of those times.

Thoughts on a Las Vegas trip with barely any gambling...

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Chicago reviews: Edzo's & David Burke's Primehouse

Two places from this past weekend's visit to Chicago merit reviews: Edzo's (burgers) and David Burke's Primehouse (steaks).

First, though, a quick recap of what we did...with precious few photos.

• Friday
  • Megabus departure from Music Hall at 8am - easy trip, front seats upstairs
  • Arrived in Chicago ~1:30pm, slightly but not significantly late
  • Walked ~15 min to Hotel Blake - got upgrade to corner room when I mentioned our anniversary, great view of Willis Tower
  • late lunch at Xoco (marvelous, as always)
  • walked around Millennium Park (under construction using geofoam, fascinating)
  • dinner at Sofi (pasta, helping The Girl stay meatless on Good Friday)

Sofi's dining room (not my pic) - we sat in the center there against the wall

 

 

The view from our hotel room at night

Why this year was a failure...

Randal is right.

This year was a failure for me, too.

At some point I need to find a way to see the aurora borealis.

SubZero was so cool!

On one of my many travels this summer, I was lucky enough to get to visit SubZero, an ice cream store that makes their ice cream to-order with big squirts of liquid nitrogen.

The menu was a bit daunting with options on top of options:

• 5 six cream bases (premium, lowfat, custard, yogurt, non-dairy, soy/rice)
• 47 flavors (strawberry, chocolate, vanilla...citric acid, watermelon, Mt Dew, cotton candy...)
• 33 mix-ins (berries, chocolate flakes, Andes mints, mangoes, bubblegum...)
• various consistencies from soft serve to hard frozen

 ...but I managed to make a few choices and get to the sweet treat. Turns out the quick-freezing action of liquid nitrogen makes for a very smooth ice cream because the ice crystals never have a chance to grow large and make for grainy ice cream. The on-demand production lets them have all the options for everybody to order.

And it turns out it makes outstanding ice cream...with a show.

It's a blast. Give it a try if you're ever in the area. The closest to me (where I am in Cincinnati) is in downtown Cincinnati.


 Plus they do some pretty cool-looking educational outreach...

Googling the Grand Canyon

Google just Street-Viewed (is that a word?) the Grand Canyon, and you can take their tour through Google Maps.

That's awesome.

On their blog, they also shared video about how they did this, with a team of hikers carrying down forty-pound, backpack-mounted cameras. (More photos of the hikers here) They went down Bright Angel Trail and South Kaibab Trail, out to Plateau Point, and eventually all the way to Phantom Ranch.

They have been to the North Rim but only on the roads, no hiking down from there. Maybe that's for next summer.

...couldn't drag me away...

How gorgeous is that photo (source)?

It's a silhouette of the Wild Horses Monument in Eastern Washington State, and I'm thinking that we've got a new destination for vacation some day.

There are a bunch more photos at this site...

...and video here...

Vacationing in an oat box

It's been a slow summer at Casa de ChemGuy what with The Girl having UC summer school all season. That means we didn't have any sort of actual big vacation like we've had the past few years. Instead, I got to drop down to Houston and over to Indianapolis to teach a couple of ASM Materials Science camps. In neither city, however, did I get to see any real part of the city. They're working trips where I'm hanging in the lab from seven to seven, grabbing a quick bite to eat, and heading back to the hotel to look at the next day's PowerPoint.

This week, though, I got to take a three-day vacation to picturesque Akron, Ohio.

No, The Girl didn't come along. This was just me and twenty-seven of my closest friends hanging at the National Center for Education and Research on Corrosion and Materials Performance to learn about the national problem that is corrosion. G'head and ask me just about anything about corrosion and how I'm gonna teach my students about it this year. I'm a frickin' expert now...

The coolest part of the trip, though, was getting to stay at the Quaker Square Inn, the second oddest hotel in America.

See, it's a freakish hotel that's inside the old Quaker Oats factory where they just carved into the concrete silos to make the rooms. It's more than a little odd with the whole cement murals in the lobby, and elevators in one of the silos, and the first floor rooms having fourteen-foot ceilings with a set of electrical outlets at thirteen feet from the floor 'cause...um...'cause it's odd.





The place was opened in 1976...



...but now it's half hotel (the first three floors) and half dorm (the other five floors)...very odd...



Seriously, though, if you get the chance to take the corrosion camp, you should do it. The field trip to AZZ Galvanizing alone is worth it.

Field trips

Places I need to visit that are within a day trip length 'cause this year's vacation time looks to be pretty non-existant with The Girl in UC summer classes all summer.

• Entertrainment Junction, West Chester, OH - This one's like ten minutes from my house, and I have a Groupon for entry for two before the end of June. I'm going to see this one for certain this summer.

• Toy and Plastic Brick Museum, Bellaire, OH - It's a very unofficial Lego museum over on the far eastern edge of Ohio. I'm thinking I'm a gonna check it out this summer. I especially dig the downhome vibe because this museum is a total labor of love for one guy. I dig it, and I feel like supporting him. I just wish his online shop was actually up and running. Four hour drive away...hopefully it's a little more joyous than the building's outside looks to be.

• Brazee Street Studios, Cincinnati, OH - There's a glass art studio here in town. Might as well check out the work over there 'cause I love glass artwork.

• Kokomo Opalescent Glass, Kokomo, IN - One of the other master teachers with the ASM summer camps (material science stuff...I'll be in Houston in a week or so teaching their stuff) says this factory is a must to be seen. Kokomo's only three hours away from home for me. 

What other places should I check out? My limit is about the four hours drive for the not-Lego museum.

Update: Einstein on the Beach - reflections

 Some footage from the Ann Arbor performance...

"You don't have to understand anything. It's a work where you go, and you can get lost...and that's the idea." - Robert Wilson

Wikipedia: the cause of and solution to so many of our problems

Each day I look up some date in history and write that year as today's date on the board in my classroom.

Today, for example, was 12 March, 1912 in honor of the founding of the Girl Scouts. I then draw a stick figure representation of the event and encourage my students to guess the event. Especially considering my limited art skills, they do pretty well.

It helps me that Wikipedia has an article of every day's significant (by whatever definition the Wikipedia community chooses to define that word) events, births, and deaths. Check out March 12, for example.

I also tend to check the History Channel's Today in History as another source of events and today found that the 1888 blizzard that hit NYC and dumped 40" of snow happened on this date. In the History Channel's article on the blizzard, I found this sentence...

Even "Leather Man," a fixture of New York and Connecticut history who had walked a circuit of 365 miles every 34 days for three decades, was reportedly delayed four days by the Blizzard of 1888.

Clearly, I had to head to Wikipedia to find out about this "Leather Man". I quote from their article here...

The Leatherman (ca. 1839–1889) was a particular vagabond, famous for his handmade leather suit of clothes, who traveled a circuit between the Connecticut and the Hudson River from about 1856 to 1889. Although of unknown origin, he was thought to be Canadian, or possibly French, because of his fluency in French, his broken English and the French Language prayer book found on his person after his death. His identity remains controversial, and unknown.

How fascinating is that? He apparently made his 365-mile circuit around Connecticut every thirty-four days like clockwork, regularly enough that when the blizzard delayed him, people noticed.

I love...Love...LOVE that Wikipedia has documented Leather Man (or Leatherman or Leather-Man).

Could such a person exist in today's world? They could, right? It would be weird but not unheard of, I would guess.

Einstein on the Beach - reflections

We're a month out from having traveled to the northern, frozen wastelands of Ann Arbor, MI (though it won't be frozen for long) to see the opening night preview performance of Philip Glass and Robert Wilson's Einstein on the Beach, the first performance of the opera in twenty years, the opening preview night of only the fifth staging of the opera ever.

First off, I will say that it's an amazing piece of work - the music, the performance, the repetition, the experience, everything. The opera has to be one of the most unique, stunning, repetitive, meditative experiences that I've ever been a part of. I don't know that I understand the piece - even a tenth or a hundredth of the piece, but I'm absolutely thrilled that I was there.

The work was, admittedly, long - four and a half hours in length, top to tail, performed without an intermission, meaning that people had to make their own breaks. The Girl took two breaks in the performance, but I never left the theater. It made for a very odd, gorgeous experience with acts and scenes progressing with little connection from one to the other, something that I've certainly never experienced in my theater-going experience.



I keep struggling to use the term 'opera' to describe Einstein as my views of opera have always involved telling a story via song, acting, and dance, and Einstein certainly isn't any sort of storytelling. It is, in fact, the antithesis of story. Each act, each scene (?), each movement seems to exist in total independence of the others, utilizing the same performers but often without any relation to them having been on stage previously. The music is repetitive to a fault, something that I found meditative and gorgeous but something that The Girl found - and know going in that she would find - the music droning and tedious.

To me the repetition of the music allowed me to often slip away from the music, to let my mind drift and focus on the details of the performance. At times there was so much action on stage - a dozen performers each moving and singing, dancing or standing still but shifting their head or their hands or even one finger - that I found the visuals hard to follow. I had to choose to follow one performer for a time and then to shift my attention elsewhere, only to find myself shocked at the changes that had taken place before I could look back.

At other times, the repetition took place around a nearly empty stage with two, one, or - in one notable scene shown at the top of this post - no one on stage for twenty (?) minutes in which a single, brilliant, huge bar of light shifted from horizontal to vertical and then rose off the stage at a glacial pace. Neither - the action-filled stage or the person-less stage was any less fascinating. Both were utterly mesmerizing.

The above scene, for example (photo from the 1992 production), consisted of...

• the man in red (front, right) writing on an invisible chalkboard with one repeated motion for twenty minutes without any other motion
• the boy on the balcony holding and rotating a glowing cube for minutes at a time breaking his motion up only by pulling paper airplanes from his satchel and throwing them onto the stage
• the two-dimensional train smoking for the full twenty minutes before finally sliding onto the stage while the engineer smoked his pipe, not speaking or moving otherwise
• one dancer methodically dancing diagonally back and forth from the back right to front left corner, sometimes seeming to move slightly further left with each pass and sometimes seeming to make the exact...same...path with every pass...the pacing of the dancing, the other motion going on the whole time made it almost impossible to discern whether the progression was real or in my mind
• the newspaper-holding dancer working his way across the stage in an labyrinthine but rectilinear pathway full of ninety degree angles
• the shell-holding man on the left walking almost as John Cleese's Ministry of Silly Walks sketch across the stage

I wanted to watch every person to see what they were doing, to see if they would make some change to their action that would reveal something, but I couldn't watch them all so I found myself having to alternately split my attention among them all and focus on one to the exclusion of the others knowing that it was the only way I could  have any hope of being anything other than surprised by the changes I had missed.

Though every scene was both stunning and tedious, three scenes in particularly stood out to me:

• The person-less stage with the light making progress with the music became an entirely meditative moment, knowing that the motion was so slow that I could turn away but knowing that there was nothing to which I could turn my attention. It was gorgeous.
• One scene in particular had an extended saxophone solo played while the entire cast - twenty-plus performers - came onto the stage to stand in front of a scrim on which was painted a building (shown to the right in the 1992 production) with a man with chalk. The saxophone was so different from the rest of the music, almost something you would hear in a 1980's movie soundtrack over a long pair of legs - only if those legs were on screen for half an hour (maybe, I lost track of time repeatedly through the night) while every performer walked on stage one at a time, turning to look at the chalk-holding man before another performer entered.
• The finale was a huge set piece with the whole orchestra and all the performers on a three-story set, each standing in front of a light design or circles, graphs, and lines while two identically-dressed performers shifted up and down, back and forth across the stage in glass boxes.The scale of the set was stunning after so many minimalist sets, sometimes no more than light on a blank stage with ballet dancers crossing the stage.

There were very few things that I could definitively say reference Einstein, and none of those were ever made obvious or overt.

• The concept of trains appeared numerous times, and I know Einstein initially described the theory of relativity, the concept that each of us moves in reference to our frame as two people on neighboring trains seeing the other begin to move and not knowing which of them was moving. Movement from either without a non-moving frame of reference would be impossible to identify as movement from either.
• At one point the singers stuck out their tongues after furiously 'brushing' their teeth with toothbrushes. Einstein does have a famous photo of him sticking his tongue out.
• The trial scenes took place in front of a backdrop of an eclipse with two pinpoints of light, one on each side of the moon. One of the most famous public proofs of the theory of relativity involved the lensing of a distant star around an eclipse, allowing us to see in action the lensing effects of gravity.
• A scrim dropped in front of the three-story scene depicting an atomic explosion (a mushroom cloud) with scientific explanations abounding. Einstein certainly had much to do with the ideas behind the atomic bomb.

Other than those, I really don't know what much of the piece had to do with Einstein...which is both beautiful and frustrating.

There was a film booth in the theater lobby in which anyone could sit down and give their impressions - before, during, after the performances. We eschewed the booth, even as the opening night performance was held back half an hour due to the nasty, snow-covered roads. I did, however, get to spend some time in the lobby (we got there forty-five minutes before the intended curtain) watching the guy on the right of this video.

I couldn't tell if he was entirely there, somehow mentally off, or just eccentric. The Girl came down in the camp of eccentric.



I was amazed at how many times in the performance I laughed. Because of the constant repetition, even the smallest human moments were beautifully rewarding. When one performer, for example, stalked onto the stage with exaggerated, dramatic steps and turned toward the crowd flashing a huge smile, the entire audience laughed out loud. Such small moments because huge because of the lack of time frame, the disconnection from the passage of time - something that I imagine was referencing Einstein, as well.

There are very few photos - and no videos - from the 2012 performances that I can find online. Here are the few (all of which will make gorgeous desktop backgrounds at school) that I can find thanks to the pomegranate arts who put on this year's shows.

You can get some scenes from the 1984 production below, interspersed with interview clips with Wilson and Glass, themselves. The 2012 production was, from what I can see in all the images and clips on the web, substantively identical to the 1984 (and, I assume, original productions). Einstein - in a surprisingly small part, really - was played by an Asian women instead of a white man, but the sets, the costumes, the staging that you can see in the video are all very much like what we saw in Ann Arbor.



If you want to know more about Einstein, check out this documentary on the opera. You'll get to see footage from the 1984 production. It's uploaded to YouTube in its entirety but broken into four parts totaling nearly an hour long.



Everyone at a musical performance takes in the performance on their own. This work, however, seems even more so as there is no story, no path to take with your fellow theater-goers. To this end, I thoroughly enjoyed the reactions of the people near us.

The Girl was beside an older couple who spent large swaths of the performance dozing.

We had a couple behind us who leaned in as the bar of light tilted and rose and asked each other, "Do you know what this movement is called?"..."How to waste ten minutes."...Ten minutes later they leaned together and amended the previous statement to "twenty minutes"...

Beside me, sitting solo at the end of our row, was a man who knew the music backwards and forward, asking me why people would be leaving at this moment, if they had no idea what was coming next. I didn't admit to him that I didn't have any clue what was coming, that I'd never actually listened to the work in its entirety - or as entire as the three-cd set that I have (and that is apparently four cds).

To quote these people who were at the Saturday performance (I was at Friday's), "I think this is one of Philip Glass's best operas about Einstein."



I would certainly agree with that assessment, and I'm thrilled that I got to see this phenomenal work in its entirety.

...and I owe The Girl big time...

Lonnieburger Baskets: Sidetracks

Though it may appear that the quest for the perfect burger has stalled, the quest marches on.

Yes, it's pretty clear to me that Terry's has the best burgers in town with Senate and Cafe de Wheels in close second and third, respectively. There is always, however, the hope that we'll find another spectacular burger in the Cincy area.

Source: AnnArbor.com

And there's the hope that when we go on vacation we can find a great burger out in the non-Queen City part of the world. To that end we dropped into Sidetrack Bar and Grill in Ypsilanti, MI back in January. Considering that GQ named the Sidetrack burger one of the twenty burgers you must eat before you die (Sidetrack camein at #19), hopes were high. Should they have been? Let's look at the numbers...

Here's what GQ had to say...

19. Our Famous Burger,

Sidetrack Bar and Grill - Ypsilanti, MI
Here is one of my core culinary credos: The closer you come to a college campus, the worse burgers get. Sidetrack Bar and Grill—named for its location next to an old railroad siding—is an exception. This modern-looking pub, around since 1850, doesn’t seem concerned with pleasing undiscerning Eastern Michigan University freshmen. “We don’t get much of a young crowd,” my waitress said. The meat, a secret blend, tastes like chuck. The sesame-seed bun is small, soft, and grilled. I recommend a visit to the automobile museum across the street, although they won’t let you play drive-in and eat your burger in a vintage car.

Burger

• Man, I didn't get any particularly impressive 'secret blend' of spices here. The burger was a burger. There's a little pepper in there I can see, but I didn't taste much of anything outside simple, decent quality burger meat. The patty was a little on the shiny side but not unreasonably so. Burger - 6 

Toppings

•  For winter, that's not a bad tomato slice. The lettuce is lettuce. The bacon was well done but not as crisp as I would like it. The bacon was flavorful. The cheddar was amply applied with a large slice melted all across the patty and even onto the bun. The toppings are solid but unspectacular, something that's pretty much what I can say across the board about this burger. Toppings - 6 

Fries

• Fries are offered either plain or with cajun spices, garlic, or salt and pepper (each for an extra fifty cents). They also have sweet potato fries for an extra back. The Girl chose the regular fries, and I went for the garlic option. If you're not gonna splurge on vacation, when are you gonna splurge? My fries came out without any garlic, however, so I can't speak to the spice options. Both my fries and The Girl's fries came out hot and well cooked. They could have been crisper, but they weren't greasy or limp by any means. Fries - 6 

Ambiance

• This is easily the best part of Sidetracks. The main bar feels authentically old, and the whole place has gorgeous woodwork, a fireplace that was roaring fire when we were there, a beautiful huge mirror behind the old bar, and nice windows showing the snow-covered streets of Ypsilanti. The ceiling is old tin, and the place feels right. We ate at an off time, around 2-3pm, so Sidetracks wasn't crowded, but it still felt like home. Ambiance - 8

Cost

• A burger is just $9.25 with fries and bacon. I added cheese (50 cents) fries spice (50 cents but not actually served). The diet coke was $2.25. That's...um...$12.50. Not good...Cost - 3 

Other Schtuff

• When I ordered a Diet Coke, they brought me an extra carafe of Diet Coke. That's very cool. +1
• Seriously, love the woodwork all around. +1
• Um...that's about all I've got.

To the totaling...totalization...adding crap up...

+1 +1 +3 +8 +6 +6 +6...That's like a zillion...Or 31...One of the best burgers in the country, one of the burgers you have to eat before you die only got 31 points?

Kinda disappointing...

• Terry's Turf Club - 45
• Cafe de Wheels - 44
• Senate - 43 
• City View Tavern - 40 (scaled from 32/40)
• Stuffed on Vine - 38
• Five Guys Burgers and Fries - 36 
• Roxy's - 36
• VanZandt - 34
• Gabby's - 34 
• Oakley Pub & Grill - 34 
• Quatman's - 32 / 34.5
• Troy's - 32 
• By Golly's - 32
• Wildflower Cafe - 31.25 (scaled from 26/40) 
• Sidetracks - 31
• Virgil's Cafe - 28
• The Pub at Rookwood Mews - 28
• Smashburger - 28
• Habits Cafe - 28
• Graffiti Burger - 27
• Arthur's - 26
• Sammy's - 25 
• Gordo's - 20

Even though there are only 18 better burgers in the nation according to GQ, we have fourteen better burgers in Cincinnati.

I'm thinking GQ lied.

Vacation recap: Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore (part 3)

When last we left our intrepid campers, they had boarded a ferry bound for South Manitou Island, the southernmost island in a chain in Lake Michigan.

The ferry left from Leland (right-hand arrow below), and the weather was clear as a bell, so we could see South and North Manitou both as we passed by the crib (a lighthouse marking a shallow shoal running from the tip of North Manitou out to the lighthouse. We didn't really know exactly where we were headed even though we'd been able to see the island from our campground (left-hand arrow below) all week.

Sleeping Bear photo contest

My photos are nowhere near the quality of the photos entered in this year's photo contest held by Preserve Historic Sleeping Bear, a group of volunteers that do good work in and around the national lakeshore.

The winner gets their photo sold as postcards in the Sleeping Bear shops. I voted for the Premium View! shown below, but you're free to cast your vote as you wish.

I'm kind of amazed that none of the photos actually show the lakeshore. Maybe that's the bias of the group running the contest.

Vacation recap: Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore (part 2)

So, when last we left our intrepid campers, it was the night of Monday, July 11...What would they do from there?

Read on, loyal reader, Excelsior!

Tuesday, July 12

Toasted bagels again (with peanut butter and jelly [jelly stolen from J&S Hamburg's table] ) before remembering to put on sunscreen and bug spray before we headed hiking (kinda forgot that yesterday morning on the Lasso Loop). And onward to the Pyramid Point trail we went - which did have a gorgeous overlook onto Lake Michigan...

On the way to the trail, we stopped in Glen Arbor to pick up some fresh goods from a farmers market - local cherries and sugar snap peas. At the edge of the the market, we were asked to sign a petition against PA4. When we told them that we were from out of state but sided with them as we had worked on the SB5 petition. They congratulated us and said that once they saw that we'd gotten 1.3 million signatures, that they knew 'if the Buckeyes could do it, so could we." Good luck, ladies.

Vacation recap: Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore (part 1)

The Girl and I just got back from eight days of camping in Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore (and one of hotelling at Park Place in Traverse City, MI).

The short version of the recap is that we dug the camping and loved the park. Our last two nights on the island were nice, too, but we wouldn't want to be out there any longer.

For more details, I'm thankful that The Girl wrote a daily recap of each day's events. I warn you that this'll be a photo-heavy post, so I'm going to put it after the jump. Read on if you want to...

I didn't get to see much of Houston while I was down there. Saturday's transportation was awful; I've covered that. Sunday was unpacking at the camp site and dinner of good Mexican food.

From there, the days went pretty much like this: breakfast at the hotel, to camp by 7:20am, away from camp at 7 or 8pm, quick dinner near the hotel (all chain restaurants, meh), sleep, repeat.

On Friday evening, after the camp was wrapped up and packed away, however, we at least go dinner at someplace interesting, the Houston Aquarium (quick review: kid friendly, decent if overpriced food, neat fish tank surroundings).

On the way back from the aquarium, however, there was a bit of getting lost. At the end, however, I was happy we got lost because we passed one of the neatest things I saw in all of Houston: A Tribute to American Statesmanship.

The series of four busts - George Washington, Abe Lincoln, Sam Houston, and Stephen F Austin - is located just next to I-10 and has apparently been nicknamed Mount Rush Hour (I chuckle, seriously).

In searching for a bit of information about this wacked out set of statues - and especially about their location in a bit of a weird neighborhood - I found the following bits of info...

• The statues are really big - 22ft high and a combined 60ft wide. (Source)
• The statues are lit up at night. (Source w/ photo)
• They're in a rough neighborhood. (Source w/ photo)
• David Adickes, the sculptor,works in really big concrete statuary. (Source w/ photos)
• These are only a few of the presidential busts that Adickes has made. Check the two Presidents Parks where his work can be seen.
• Apparently there was supposed to be a third Presidential Park in Pearland, TX (a Houston suburb), but financing fell through.
• Kids can get right up and touch the presidents. (Source w/ photo)
• Google's StreetView blurred the presidents' faces. (Source w/ photo)
• They're technically at the corner of Bingham & Elder in Houston, TX. (Google Maps link)
• The statues weren't there when Bing took some of its aerial view photos. Rotate 'em around to see them from two of the four directions. (Bing maps link)
• People have done some weird photo paintings of the statues. (Source w/ aforementioned photo paintings)
• It's at the intersection of I-10 and I-45. (Source)

Wacky stuff...

Photo credits...up top...with the yellow truck...down low...

A Revelation

Down in Houston this past week, I tried a snack bag of Flamin' Hot Cheetos Limon (that's 'with lime').

They're phenomenal.

Outstanding.

Find some.

I'm gonna see if Jungle Jim's can start carrying them.

If not, I may have to start driving down and back, opening up my own corner stand.

Arrrggghhh

It seemed so simple...

• 5:30am flight from Dayton to Charlotte - two and a half hour layover
• 9:30am flight from Charlotte to Dallas - two hour layover
• 1:10pm flight from Dallas to Houston - and done at 2:28pm

Looks like it should all work out just fine. There's enough time to grab a meal in Dallas, enough time that even a few delays shouldn't be a problem. Heck, The Girl even dropped me off at Dayton at 4:20 - tons of time to make it through security and onward to the gate. Dayton's a nice little airport. Things should be beautiful.

Should...

The flight from Dayton took off on time right at 5:30. At 5:40, however, the pilot came on and told us we were returning to Dayton because of mechanical problems. Little delay. His words were that they didn't yet know whether it was a little glitch of a significant problem. Could be a quick check or an hour to get it fixed.

We sat on the tarmac for ten or so minutes and got told it was a significant problem, at least an hour to fix. We got off the plan and were given cards to call US Air's customer service number in case we had connections that would be missed.  At this point, we weren't looking at taking off until 7:30, probably missing my connection to Dallas. The customer service folks were nice and helpful and even eliminated a connection...

• 1:01pm flight from Charlotte to Houston - longer layover in Charlotte but only one connection - better! - done at 2:31pm

7:30 became 9:00 became 10:00 became a cancelled flight to Charlotte, so on the phone again (1-888-200-9865 - I have it memorized at this point.) Grab a bagel and an apple from Starbucks. Luckily there's an easy enough work around:

• 12:05pm flight from Dayton to Charlotte - eighty minute layover
• 2:50pm flight from Charlotte to Houston (get in at 4:23pm - ninety minutes late, not too bad)

Still workable. I'm coming to love the Dayton airport. Interesting carpet.

The only problem is that I don't actually have a seat on the 12:05 flight from Dayton. I'm on standby, and they're hoping people will take their $275 incentive to get bumped.

Predictably, nobody took the incentive. I'm on the phone again.

• 1:21pm flight from Dayton to Philadelphia - forty minute layover (tight, tight)
• 3:30pm flight from Philadelphia to Charlotte - an hour layover
• 6:20pm flight from Charlotte to Houston - done at 7:55 (now five and a half hours late)

It's 12:20pm. I've been in the Dayton airport since 4:30 - other than thirty minutes on the plane and tarmac. Grab a chicken sandwich and fries from the little bar. Not a bad sandwich.

Oddly, I made the 1:21pm flight. Of course, it didn't take off until twenty minutes late and took more time to get to Philly than it should have. So I deplane at 3:20pm to make my 3:30pm flight. Things'll still work fine if the connection's close. I'm taking off from gate A20. We're getting in to...F terminal.

It's a bus ride from F to A. I get to A20 at 3:46.

I'm on the phone again.

• 1:21pm flight from Dayton to Philadelphia - this one's already happened, made it out of Dayton
• 6:00pm flight from Philadelphia to Chicago - layover ninety minutes
• 9:15pm flight from Chicago to Houston on Continental - done at 11:43pm (nine hours late)

I take a walk from A20 to C25 and sit down. C25 is a huge area. It's got tons of space to spread out. So the gate gets moved to C19 which is small, cramped, and hot.

Thanks, kids.

The Chicago flight starts boarding at 6:00...for a 6:00 take-off. It's a huge plane with relatively comfy seats.

We leave the ground at 6:40.

They make up most of the time in the air, and we get in only ten minutes late somehow. I head to the Continental gate B4 to make sure things are kosher because I had a boarding pass printed by US Air for a Continental flight. The gate's moved to B2. I check in with the gate agent who says, "Oh, you're the one. I saw we had somebody on this flight without a ticket."

Without a ticket?

Somehow US Air entered things wrong, and the gate agent said she had to get me a paper ticket. She's on the phone this time. She heads to an office, prints me a ticket, and I'm straight on the plane.

Seats are a little tight.

Then my neighbor sits down.

She's...um...well...she's a little plump.

Let's just say that quarters were a bit cramped.

Let's say she had her seat, a quarter of my seat, and a quarter of the seat on the other side, too.

I wish I had a more story-arc appropriate ending, folks. The last flight was cramped and packed, but we actually got into Houston twenty minutes earlier than scheduled. I got a shuttle to the hotel, and the hotel folks gave me a key that worked just fine.

So, after getting up at 2:30am Saturday to get a 5:30am flight, I landed in Houston at 11:30pm Saturday and made it to my hotel at 12:40am Sunday.

Why, yes, I do love flying, why do you ask?

PS - In case you were wondering, I'm in Houston to help teach a Material Science camp for ASM.