David S. Atkinson's Blog, page 32

Burnt Hot Dog Week Day Three

Burnt hot dog week day three.

Burnt Hot Dog Week Day Two

Burnt hot dog week day two.

Burnt Hot Dog Week!

Burnt hot dog week!

Does That Count As A Delayed United Flight Or Not?

I’m trying to figure out if I should count last night’s United flight as delayed or not. The reason this is relevant is that my United flights have been delayed the last 6 trips, or about 12 flights in a row.

My recent flight out on them was delayed because they took a half hour extra to load luggage on the plane coming in. This last flight took off 45 minutes late because they dorked around doing stuff for 20 minutes after we were loaded and then we were behind 21 planes waiting to use the runway. Despite that, we still somehow arrived 10 minutes ahead of schedule.

Do I count that as delayed or not? Sure they still got us in on time, but they clearly could have gotten us in even earlier.

I Promise I’m Still Going To Read “Ducks, Newburyport”

I promise I’m still going to read Ducks, Newburyport. I said I was going to and I’m going to. It’s sitting on my nightstand waiting. I was going to start as soon as I got back from South Africa, because I didn’t want to lug it around on a plane, much less take up the luggage space for it (flights/trips being one of the few times I use a Kindle or Kindle app in order to conserve luggage space). Then I had to fly two days out and back for a client visit two days after getting back from vacation. Clearly I couldn’t start it until returning from my business trip. Regardless, it’s coming.

It Turned Out That We Had The Power All Along

My wife wanted to hit a seafood restaurant in terminal 5 of Heathrow airport on our way home from vacation recently that we’d previously visited. We hoped we could get there, given how segmented Heathrow is. However, we were coming into terminal 5, though flying out through terminal 3. That should work, right?

Well, coming into terminal 5 arrivals you can only go certain places. One of those places is not the departures area of terminal 5, where the restaurant was found. That’s because that area of terminal 5 can be exited to outside without passing through customs, and we had not passed through customs. They direct you a different way instead, either to customs or to your connecting flight. Ours was in terminal 3, as I mentioned before.

All right, we went through customs. That’s pretty simple for us, but they then wouldn’t let us enter terminal 5 to get to departures because our flight was out of a different terminal. Understandable, but annoying.

So we just went to terminal 3 like they wanted us to. As we were trying to figure out where to go else instead, we realized that they had expanded to seafood restaurant to have a location in terminal 3 as well.

As it turned out, we had the power to go to the seafood restaurant all along and all our other efforts were just folly.

Another Way To Stretch Posts On Vacation

Well, if all went well, the last 15 days should have had posts each with a single letter that aggregated spell in sequence “IM IN SOUTH AFRICA.” This has been another way of stretching out posts while I’m on vacation.

A

C

R