Wednesday, January 04, 2012

Happy New Year!

Edit:  Who the fuck wrote this?  What horrible grammar.  Fixed.


It's a little belated, I realize, but I was on vacation.  Besides, the year is still new, anyway.  I spent a wonderful week in England, where the weather was a hell of a lot better than it is here.  The day I got back, there were 3 inches of snow on the ground and the temperature was 8.  (-13 if you prefer Celsius.)  That's fucking cold!

The trip home was a bit interesting.  I was worried from the start, because it stormed pretty bad the night before.  I could hear the rain, wind, and thunder as I laid awake in bed -- I didn't sleep one bit, either.  Fortunately, this worked out to my advantage later on.  (The fact that I didn't sleep one bit, not the weather.)

After I got to my gate at Norwich Airport, I learned that there was a problem with my plane.  Apparently, there was something hanging from it.  It wasn't something vital -- just a seal of some kind -- but naturally, they aren't allowed to fly the plane with something like that flapping around.  Therefore, they had to call in engineers to rivet the piece back in place.  This took until 11:00, which was 1.05 hours after I was supposed to take off.  We were in the air 2 hours later than we should have been.  As a result, I missed my connecting flight in Amsterdam.

I was quite worried that I would end up being stuck in Amsterdam for a whole 24 hours.  After I landed, my flight wasn't even on the board any longer, so I definitely missed it.  (I had hoped that maybe it had been delayed by the weather, but it was not.)  I walked to my gate, thinking that if I was going to use a "transfer desk", I should probably use one close to my gate.  That was probably where my airline's desks would be.  I was right on that assumption.  Good thing, since I was in a country where the primary language is not English.

I walked up to a self-serve kiosk, and scanned my boarding pass.  The computers had automatically re-booked my remaining two flights, so I was pretty impressed with that.  I printed my new boarding passes and looked at the departure time for my next flight -- I was now going to Detroit instead of JFK.  (I found that amusing -- that was my path on the way to England.)  The departure time was actually very soon, and the boarding time was just about the same time that my previous flight departed -- which was now 20 minutes ago.  Ah.

So there I went, running like hell through the walkways of Schiphol.  Like a boss.

I made it to the gate with plenty of time to spare, and the flight was fine.  I actually slept for 4 solid hours, which cut the flight in half for me.  That was fantastic.  It's the first time I've ever been able to sleep on a plane.

The 4 hours that I was awake weren't bad either, and I actually didn't do much reading.  (Maybe an hour or two.)  I was sat next to an older English gentleman, and the two of us actually did some talking.  His name was Tom, and he's from Yorkshire.  His sister lives in Norwich, and he was familiar with North Walsham and Cromer.

The rest of the trip was fairly uneventful (thankfully).  I'm home in one piece, and looking forward to 2012.  It should be a really interesting year.

I don't make New Year's resolutions.  I think they're stupid, and I also think that you shouldn't simply wait to do something for when the year is new.  Time is relative, anyway.

On that note, I'm off to perform other tasks relative to my programming.  

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