Wednesday – 27 Decemeber 2006 (…as it bleeds into Thursday morning)
I am back in Utah.

I had a wonderful time with my family and friends.  I didn’t get to spend a lot of time with my family today – again, the “real world” reared it’s ugly head – but I did get to spend some time with them.  I was a bit irritable – I had to drive myself to Charlotte and my goodbyes to them were almost three hours before I left – but, as they say: All good things must come to an end.
I wish that I could say that the drive to the airport was uneventful.  It wasn’t.  About thirty-five to forty miles north of Charlotte, I got caught in construction traffic.  Between exits.  I lost about fifteen minutes trying to get to the next exit.  Then, I got off the highway and drove through Spencer and Salisbury in an attempt to bypass the traffic jam.  It worked.  I got to the airport with plenty of time to spare.

A few things struck me on the flights back.  I guess that they could technically be ‘Toasters, but I won’t tag them as such.  This time.

  1. I flew on Northwest Airlines.  Their logo just says “nwa” and is plastered over everything.  That’s all well and good… but I am Ivory Soap sure that 15 – 20 years ago, that would have never happened.  Call it a hunch, but I doubt that they’d want to be associated with “the other NWA.”  But, the thought amused me quite a bit.
  2. Don: I discovered a variant of the “Go – No Go” game  while waiting for my flight out of Minneapolis into SLC: The Mo-No Mo game.
  3. Until the past few years, I never really “got” what my uncle meant when he used to talk about being so far from home (when he lived in Anchorage).  I always thought “It’s not that bad.  You can just hop on a plane and be there.”  Which is true… but it’s not the same.  I may be slow on the uptake, but I get there eventually.
  4. Learning to Fly, the Pink Floyd version, played on the iPod on the way back from Minneapolis.  It sparked a line of thought about flying, literal and metaphorical.
  5. As we got nearer to SLC, the cloud cover got more dense, until there was a blanket of clouds below us.  It reminded me of the Can You Read My Mind portion of Superman: the Movie.
  6. I had a window seat, over the wing, from Minneapolis to Salt Lake.  When I looked out the window at the engine and the wing, I thought about The Twilight Zone episode (and the Twilight Zone: The Movie movie vignette) “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet.”  And the 3rd Rock from the Sun parody of it, too.  There were no gremlins on the wing, though.  Nor were William Shatner or John Lithgow on my flight.

Okay.  To bed.

Namaste.