Air travel

I swear they just announced that “USAirways is paging passenger Nervous Edwards to Gate 37 for immediate departure.” Yes, that’s what they said. Several times.

There is a lot of unused infrastructure in airports these days, leftover reminders of the good old days when you could possibly find a gate agent at a gate. A combination of security, electronic checkin and economic necessity means there are no longer airline staff standing around waiting to help passengers. If you want to check a flight’s status, you’d better walk over to the screens. If you want to change your seat, you’d better do that before you clear security. Checking at the gate doesn’t happen anymore. (Security was a breeze tonight, but there’s never any predicting how it will go.) So there all these desks and service counters that simply aren’t used anymore … And behind them are the lonely payphones, suffering a similar fate. It’s kind of like a piece of this shiny new terminal died, and we’re all just stepping around it out of respect. And it doesn’t smell bad, so we just leave it there. All these new airport terminals that have been built over the past 10 years, and they all have these pieces of vestigial infrastructure.

My feet are killing me. I had 8 meetings on Capitol Hill today … In all six House and Senate office buildings. That’s a personal best. The construction of the visitors’ center has completely screwed up getting around the Capitol — you can no longer walk along the front, but have to go all the way up to the street, which makes getting from the Senate side to the House side unnecessarily difficult. And in the back, the preparations for the inauguration have completely messed up that side. At least you can still see the Capitol from the back. But I wouldn’t be near that mess next week for a million dollars.

Okay, but not a penny under three hundred grand.

The landing was just awful, except for the part where we didn’t actually crash. Then the drive home featured the most interesting and scary fog I’ve ever encountered — more like billowing smoke, really, or dry ice special effects, and little clouds of it would suddenly whip toward you, giving the impression of someone jumping into the road. It was pretty weird. But not as weird as what I saw as I turned the final corner for home: in the center of the street, a chipmunk spinning around in the street. I think it’s one of the signs of the apocalypse.