Plaidophile

While flying over Seattle, I couldn't help but notice how after living there for two years I recognized dozens of landmarks around the city which had various special meanings to me — places friends and I had lived, worked, and hung out, bridges I'd gone over, and so on. I thought about how it's strange how after the same amount of time in San Francisco I still didn't really know San Francisco very well and felt no such attachment to the city, after a week of talking about how much I missed Seattle and thinking of ways I could end up moving back there eventually. I felt intensely homesick and even considered "accidentally" missing my connecting flight.

But then I got back to San Francisco, and the smell was familiar and comforting, and I got on BART and the smell was familiar and (oddly) comforting. While on BART home from the airport, a woman was having trouble reading her tourist map and figuring out which BART station to get off at for her hotel. I asked where it was and she pointed to a station on her street map (which didn't label the stations), and I immediately told her, "Oh, yeah, that's Powell. I'm pretty familiar with that part of town."

Then I realized that this place is somewhere I know after all.

We are streaming the show live on the Internet. The show starts at 6 PM PDT tonight. My set is scheduled to start at 9:30 PM (the headliner!) but you should watch the whole show, especially since I'll be drumming for Naked Philosophy (the opening act) and singing in John Benjamin's chorus at 8:30ish.

I'll also be in a few of tomorrow's sets (Jon Eric and Octothorpe and maybe others?) but we don't have a lineup scheduled just yet. I also forget when the show itself starts.

9:15 Thinking about getting a massage here. Seattle airport massages still cheaper than San Francisco non-airport massages.

9:30 Finally justified in going to a Starbucks to use this gift card, and they don't take gift cards. Typical.

9:40 iPhone isn't getting a data connection even w full EDGE signal. Probably collusion between the airport WiFi provider and AT&T.

9:42 oh did I mention I only got 2 hours of sleep last night? freaking tired. got an iced tea at mini-uwajimaya (mm oolong)

9:43 where did my iced tea go? did I lose it already?

9:43 oh there it is

9:46 Can't think of any decent lyrics for the live fight title (They Meet). maybe time to just play my PSP some more.

9:47 all the beans I had for dinner last night are doing a good job of maximizing other peoples' airport agony. I please to aim.

9:55 laptop can see attwifi network, iPhone can't. laptop would cost $8 to authenticate, iPhone would be free. typical.

9:58 meh, just half an hour before I board. I can handle this.

I forgot to mention it over here on my increasingly-neglected blog but I am going to Song Fight! Live this year. I am leaving the loop pedal at home and am going to try my darndest to get a good accompaniment from people on actual instruments. So if you happen to be in the Spokane area on the 17th and 18th I would appreciate an audience!

Apparently there will be a (small) cover charge (club sound guys cost money) but I have no idea what it is. Probably $5ish.

So, if I'd gotten to the airport half an hour earlier, I'd probably have my luggage right now.

Basically, there were a whole bunch of flight delays, which caused a cascade effect, and I got lucky enough to get on an alternate flight to LAX such that I could make my original connection to ABQ (rather than having to wait for a 9 PM flight), but my baggage didn't quite make it to the plane. So it should arrive sometime tomorrow. But in the meantime if I'd actually left for the airport when I meant to, I'd probably have not had such a long line to wait in, and would have probably gotten onto the same alternate flight with enough time for my luggage to get loaded.

Forgot to mention, I'll be in Albuquerque from the 24th through the 30th, in case anyone there was interested in hanging out or anyone in SF was wondering where the hell I've gone off to.

i am tired

Arrived at the airport a couple hours early. Drank at the airport bar until I felt wobbly (which was just one "pint" where apparently this place thinks that pint is the same thing as a quart, not that I'm complaining since holy hell that was a lot of Hefeweisen for $5). Had a quick early dinner when there was half an hour before original boarding time. Finished early dinner, found out the flight's delayed an hour. I would just go back to the bar but I won't hear delay updates from there. Sigh.

Oh yeah, today for the first time ever while waiting for The Church of Beethoven's weekly show to start, I finally saw something in the wild:

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So today, stuff happened outside of SWA's control, in that a flight was delayed and that completely messed up connections. Most airlines would simply disclaim any liability for it and make it seem like they were doing me a favor in putting me on standby for some crappy flight 6 hours later, but SWA actually went out of their way to find me a replacement flight as soon as they could — and they were ready for it because as soon as they knew that my first flight was delayed, they had looked to see which passengers would be affected by the delay. And, the replacement flight only pushed me back by about an hour and a half, and there was absolutely no trouble with my checked luggage either (in fact my bag was one of the first off the carousel at my final destination!).

So, thank you, Southwest Airlines, for keeping a crappy situation from being something difficult.

I think the only thing I can complain about SWA-wise is that when I did arrive at my new connection, the next flight had already boarded, because they just decided, "Hey, the flight isn't full, no sense making people wait around until 20 minutes before the flight in the name of crowd control." So I didn't get as good of a seat as I could have. Oh darn. It's pretty hard to get upset at something which generally improved things for everyone.

• Going to great lengths to reuse plastic luggage tags through three different home addresses
• In order to do this, using a piece of an envelope from a bill rather than provide my own paper
• Adding further identification to my luggage by using a purple ribbon. Which came from a party favor from my cousin's wedding four years ago.
• Knowing exactly where this ribbon came from, and clearly remembering saving it thinking, "Hey, this might come in handy."

It turned out it was full, after all, and a good 30% of the passengers were children. Lots of screaming and crying and seat-kicking. Urgh. (And the adults on the flight weren't any better. It seemed like a bunch of people were using it as their private conference room or something. There's only so much my noise-canceling headphones can do!)

Also, if I believed in Hell, I'd like to reserve a special place in it for the following:

• People who block everyone else from deplaning by needing to go back in the plane to pick up their carryon luggage (instead of just waiting for the aisles to clear)
• People who scoff at the carryon restrictions to begin with, causing the previous issue
• Flight crew who don't actually enforce the carryon restrictions, causing people to get away with the previous issue
• People who jam up the BART turnstiles because they can't figure out how to map the picture of putting a card into a slot to the act of putting a card into a slot
• Parents who don't tell their kids to STOP KICKING THE GODDAMN SEATS. When I was a fidgety kid, if I kicked the seat in front of me, my mom would slap my hand and tell me to stop. And I'd stop.
• People who turn on their cellphones at the earliest possible opportunity (i.e. the instant the wheels touch the ground) so that they can immediately start gab-gab-gabbing about every little thing.

Okay, clearly there is a huge traveling recession right now (I was the only passenger on the airport shuttle both ways, and neither flight was even close to full, and the airport is pretty deserted), BUT Midway has perhaps the best TSA process ever. There are three lines at the beginning for beginner, casual, and expert traveler. I took the "expert" line, and I was the only one in it, until a family of three (which technically didn't fit the "expert" guideilnes since they had more than one carryon each) came up behind me and I let them get in front of me since I was caught by surprise at having basically no time to get my laptop out of my backpack and my shoes off. Huh.

Oh, and the TSA screeners in the expert line were friendly and talkative. It really changed the dynamic, since they knew they they were in for a quick screening. (Also, the pre-screening guy who checked my boarding pass was poring over my boarding pass for every little detail since, again, there was nobody else so he could actually do a proper job. Not that that's really advantageous in this case though.)