For those of you who may not remember my traveling fun, I have had...difficulties with flights before, to say the least.  And yet I still thought I could book my flight home for Xmas with a stop in O'Hare.

I learn slowly.

Or I'm too cheap to pay the extra $ to go through Midway instead. 

That may very well change.

So, this time I'm going StL->O'Hare->Hartford.  But it's a 6am flight  out of StL, so no sleep, but also means I should avoid the stacking delays that can happen in Chicago.  It also meant that I would get into the Greater New Haven area around noon, and I had plans to go shopping and cook my grandparents dinner while they were out playing bridge.

I'm so sweet it's shocking I'm still single, eh? 

And then I say things like that.

Anyway, flight at 6, landing about 7, and flight to BDL leaving about 8.  First flight of the day is unlikely to be delayed, so I should be good. 

And I was right. 

Almost.

We landed maybe 10 minutes late at O'Hare.  Plenty of time.  We taxi to our deplaning gate, I've got 40 minutes to get from gate F16 to B3 (the stewardess came by and told me while still in the air).

Then we start taxiing away from our deboarding gate.

WHAT

THE

There is another plane sitting at our gate waiting to leave!

How incompetent are you at scheduling if among all the gates at O'Hare (and there were a fair number of empty ones at the F terminal from what I could see), you can't deboard from one plane because another plane is at the same gate?!

Apparently as bad as Continental.

So we taxi away, and sit out of the way of the other planes who can do that simple task of finding an empty terminal and deboard.

I start to get anxious about missing my connection.

5 minutes of just sitting on the runway later, I am pretty much resigned to the fact that I won't be making my connection.

We spent at least 22 minutes from landing to getting off of the plane.

We eventually do get off shortly before 8, but remember where I had to go?

Deboard: F16

Board: B3

They normally have a shuttle to go between B and F, but there is no way I ould make it doing that, so I start running.

And remember this is me.  My sport is bridge.  My athletic highlight came freshman year in gym class in the first week when I adjusted to a poorly thrown post route to make a catch, which got my drafted #5 overall for the touch football season.

That GM could've actually learned something from Matt Millen.

I am doing what the next older generation called my best OJ impersonation (some car rental commercial or something?), but I wasn't leaping or bowling people over.  I just went straight with the stabbing.

Remember, I'm already going to Hell.

I get to my gate, and the plane is still there!

But they closed the gate.

Less than 3 minutes before I got there.

My heart's pounding, and I'm depressed, and there's someone else in the same situation as I am (she missed the flight, too).

She's trying to argue w/the ticket counter person (she was there before me) about letting her/us onto the plane.  They were still putting bags on! 

No dice, obviously, or you wouldn't be reading this.

So I ask her what flight she was coming in on, trying to make polite conversation.  She said this was her first flight, she lived in Chicago.

She lives in Chicago, and yet she missed her flight by minutes.

So, basically, if her lazy ass got up 5 minutes sooner, she'd be on the plane.  Whereas through no fault of my own, I'm in the same boat as her, missing my flight.

The the ticket counter lady tells her she got the last seat for the next flight to Hartford.

So, basically, if her lazy bitch ass got up 5 minutes sooner, she'd be on the plane.  Whereas now, her lazy bitch ass is on the next flight, and I'm on the one after that through no fault of my own, other than I'm not Flash, and she got to the counter before me.

That seems....

...

Hmmm...


...

I just can't think of a word that is the complete opposite of fair but has a good helping of scornful contempt. 

I'll take suggestions though.

So I go and stake out the next flight well before boarding time, as I've been put on standby for it.  I'm the 1st one in line there, and when the ticket gent shows up, I politely confirm with him that I'm indeed on standby and move over 3 feet to wait for boarding as I am not missing this flight if I can help it.  I know it might not be his fault, but if I had to wait in the airport for over 4 hours before my flight left, someone from Continental was getting an earful, and they better be buying me at least lunch.

On the plus side, the ticket I did have for the 1:30pm flight was in the exit row.

So I'm camping at the ticket counter as boarding proceeds.  He then starts calling out passengers, people who wanted to have their seats grouped together if possible, etc.  Then I see a couple who I remember as being on standby get called up and board, and then some other single traveller also get on, even though I was first on the standby list.

Oh, that ticket agent was going to have to give away kittens if I missed this flight

I politely move the three feet back over and ask him when I was going to be seated on this flight.  He said he thought he could "squeeze me on".

I managed not to lose it right then and there, and did get on the flight.

I just get to my grandparents' house in time for dinner.  So much for my plan.

There's no story for the return flight (thank you dear sweet god).

I did go out with some people from high school on the Friday after Xmas.  I met them at Bar just in time to pay the cover and leave.  I had thought we might have been staying at Bar, so I parked abit in the ghetto, but it was near where I used to work, so I was ok with it.  However, in relation to downtown, it's on the opposite side of Bar. 

And we ended up waaaaaay downtown, after the first two places we tried were far too crowded for us. 

The plan when we finally got there was to buy rounds.  So I as asked first what I wanted, so I said a Newcastle, since that was on draft.  So our first round was 1 Newcastle and 6 Bud Lights.

Bud Light?

Really?

Ok, two of them were for girlfriends/wives, but for the rest, it's not like we were playing softball.

But here is where I realize that, despite my best intentions, I might have actually matured some.  Nothing had seemed to have changed in the dynamic between these guys since really high school.  I was somewhat amazed.  Plastering Bryan's back with about 6 Bud Light labels surely didn't help either.

The bar was kind of...special.

In the short bus way.

For a time, coasters were being tossed around liek frisbees.

A couple of girls got on bar stools and danced to the Boss.

Then, a guy got up on his stool to dance.

I swear, it was like a train wreck; I could not take my eyes off of him.

And then he took his coat off and threw it down.

Ok, maybe he was getting hot.

Then he took his sweater off and whirled it around before throwing it to the ground.

Yeah.

One of the guys said he had been to gay bars in Montreal, and this guy would've been thrown right out of those.

I'm sure.

Anyway, the enxt night, I went to Bar before over time, and had a white (no sauce) mashed potato pizza, with bacon.  I know, I know, mashed potato pizza sounds disgusting.  I thought so too, until I had it.

Remember, I am a pizza snob, and I have my reason: I'm from New Haven.

I hung out with a couple of different guys that night, and that's when my friend Matt told me what has to be the funniest story I've ever heard from him.

So he's a grad student at Yale who gets to train a monkey and then monitor it's brain.  We have had conversations about the amount of poo flung.

Anyway, he was getting out of the shower, slipped, and his head broke the toilet.  Now I at first imagined a huge breakage in the bowl, and wondered how he had survived, but he just took out the tank.  And then his landlord sent over the plumbers.

BTW, it is cheaper for Matt to live in StL and commute than to live in New Haven.

The plumbers, look like Mario and Luigi!  One was small and fat, the other tall and really skinny, and they had about 5 words of English between them.  Matt asks them for a receipt for the new toilet, and he'll just pay them for it.

Sorry, we no have-a receipt-a.

The toilet was in some unmarked box, and may not have had all the parts.  Since then, Matt makes sure his rent is paid very punctually.

Maybe that story is better after a couple of beers.

So the best story come chronologically in the middle, but since you should literally always build towards the dénouement, I'll describe them however I want.  Just try and stop me. 

So, as you may be aware, the Dept of Genetics has Friday talks at 4:30 for the students to present their work, get feedback, etc.  Theoretically, everyone in a lab in the Dept should go (then carrot is a happy hour after, adn the stick is non-existent as far as I know).  In practice, this doesn't really happen.  It seems to turn into a quasi popularity contest, where the more "popular" people put more butts in the seats (regardless of science?).  I always go on the theory that if I go to theirs, they'll go to mine.  Anyway, a couple of weeks ago, someone's talk was particularly poorly attended, by PIs and students alike.  This person was in the lab of someone in the Dept you do not want to see angry.  There is talk now of putting it on hiatus for the summer (generally the most poorly attended as people do things in the summer), which I think would just kill it, unless there is a change instituted.  Pausing something people don't go to won't make them go more often, they just won't go back when it occurs again.  This affects me b/c my talk is scheduled for the summer (again), and I would actually like to do it (and you know, actually having people show up would be a plus, too).

See, gone for a year, and I can still go off on tangents.

So there was one talk from the the lab that rhymes w/Fey (I am soooo clever!) that basically boiled down to giving yeast a drug that turns them from white to beige.  The student was proposing to study (well, actually reporting on his findings, as he defended shortly thereafter) to study several strains to look at the gradation of beige to try and understand quantitative traits and population genetics.  Some of the treated strains were still white.  So I took the "opportunity" to ask wasn't the real question not why there are slight differences, but why some of the colonies were still white.  The speaker tap danced around this question, which a couple of the PIs didn't let him get away with so easily.

Pwned!

Another week, I asked a question on the second slide of purely background information, just to make sure I understood what was going on.  I stumped the student!  Later in his talk he was able to explicitly answer my question, but at the happy hour he told me how mortified he was that on his third slide I had asked something he couldn't answer.  He hadn't even started talking about any of his science yet, so he didn't think there could possibly be a question, let alone something eh couldn't answer. 

Pwned!

And now...

The reason why I should not be allowed to ask anymore questions at any talk.

This comes not from a Dept talk, but from a class where you present a research paper to the class.  A 1st year student was giving the presentation that week, and we had chatted before class, and they had seemed perfectly hale.  They started giving the presentation, and I immediately knew that is was going to be the typical 1st year, copy-and-go-over-every-figure talk.  I knew I wasn't going to like it, but I did have a question on the first figure (a co-IP for the record).  I asked it, and the speaker went silent.  Someone else came up with the answer, and the speaker attempted to go on.  They went forward a slide, yawned, got a couple of words out, yawned again, was silent for an uncomfortable amount of time, and then the next time they opened their mouth, their hand was covering it.

The reason was not a yawn.

They were vomiting.

My question caused someone to puke!

I must remember to only use this "power" for good.  With great power comes great responsibility.

And just so you don't think I'm an incredibly horrid person who brags about this kind of stuff, people I did not tell about this told me they heard about it from their boss, a professor who was at the class at the time!  And, although they didn't mention any names, they were able to figure out I was the question asker (apparently the prof talked well of me). 

Just remember to ph33r my |33+ question asking skillz, and not allow me to ask you a question lest this happen to you. 

The Lakers/Suns game was just painful to watch.  Seriously, the olé defense.  This is the playoffs!  No lay ups in the playoffs!

It's very simple (at least as I see it).  Stay on your man.  Don't let him cut, don't leave him open for a 3.  Make Nash beat you.  Let him score 40, if he can.  But don't let him get 10 assists.

In the 1st half.

Barbosa picks up 2 quick fouls playing Walton in the post.  Great.  They leave him out there. Here's an idea:  go right back to Walton, get a 3rd foul!  It took a whole quarter to get #3 on Barbosa.  Gah.  The best way to guard him (esp. when you are that afraid of him b/c he is torching you), is to get him on the bench.

And of course, there's the fact that we kept the rapist (the 1st 7 inches were consenual) and traded Shaq.

Shaq has 2 Finals and 1 ring w/out Kobe.  Kobe has never won a playoff SERIES w/out Shaq.

And really, there's only one reason I root for the Lakers. 

It's not Magic.

I was old enough to remember his retirement (and comebacks), but too young for Showtime.

It's not Kobe or Shaq.

I was rooting for the team when the starting 5 included Nick Van Exel, Eddie Jones, Vlade Divac, Cedric Ceballos, and, uh, somebody playing power forward.  I didn't like trading Eddie Jones for Glen Rice, b/c I liked his all around game, and didn't want to have to get rid of him just b/c of Kobe.  I wanted Kobe to adapt his game to play the 3.

The reason is that when Magic was facing Bird in the Finals, my dad was at a bar.  Now this being in CT, guess for whom everyone was rooting for?  So my dad, being the contrarian he is, rooted for the Lakers.

I saw the tail end of Thank You for Smoking the other day.  It was the part where our "hero" Nick had the exposé come out, and was being all depressed.  And his son comes over, and you can see him wanting to be proud of his dad.  And that snaps his dad out of his funk.

So many of my tastes are similar to my dad's.  The books and authors I like to read.  The music I listen to.  The sports teams I root for.  TV.  I remember hating when he turned on Star Trek: TOS, but I liked TNG (no links, b/c if you don't know, you don't want to know).

Yeah, some of it's environment, but it's more complicated.

But it's worked the other way, too.  I started liking the Orioles b/c of going to go see a game in Camden Yards, and some off hand comment my uncle made.  So when Mattingly retired and Steinbrenner came off of suspension, and my dad hated the Skankees again, he decided to root for the O's.  I go to college and watch animé and [adult swim], and then he's watching Witch Hunter Robin (weirdest hair EVER), ATHF, and .Hack\\Sign (Japanese for "Key of Twilight" is "Key of Twilight-o") with me.

We are so similar in a lot of other ways, mannerisms and such.  Apparently I am easily confusable for him on the phone.  My mom says I look like him at my age, except more handsome. 

And I enjoy his company and want to be "friends" with him.  He told me he waited a long time to be able to buy a beer for me at a bar (which happened at a bridge tournament, honest to God).

But it has been so many, many years since I could say I've been proud of him.

Last year I had one of the hardest conversations I've ever had with anyone.  I was at a Cardinals game, and I just called to say, hey guess where I am!  The new Busch Stadium!  And it was literally about an hour of him breaking down and saying how proud of me he was, how I was a better man than him, if he's only done one thing right in life it's his kids, etc. etc.  All this while I was at a ball game.

And now he's in jail for the next few months. 

The circumstances are such that it could only happen to someone in my family.  It really is funny, fitting, and tragic. 

But now I'm getting letters from him, and I really don't know what to say.  I dread getting the mail and seeing something from him, b/c I have to read it, and with each one I should really respond.

I have learned that books can only be sent from a bookstore or publisher.  Border's charges $4.50 for the 1st item, 50¢ for each additional.  I sent him the 8th and 9th books of a series we both enjoy.

I'll write a real letter soon.