Does This Make My Tail Look Fat?

We're in Michigan for the weekend, visiting Becky's friends in Ann Arbor and East Lansing for her birthday. We actually encountered a whole new kind of disorganized on the flight here. Our flight was at 8:30 Saturday morning, so we showed up at the airport bright and early at 7:00 AM, like good little travelers. We looked for our flight, but it wasn't there on the departure board. Puzzling, but we had a gate printed on our boarding passes, so Becky got in line for the security checkpoint and I got in line to ask the airline what was going on. Even though the security line stretched from here to next Christmas, it was moving along at a pretty good clip, so I joined her near the checkpoint after making about two feet of progress toward the airline counter. So, we headed to the gate, which had no departure flight posted, and I got in line to talk to the gate agent. Several minutes and no forward progress later, she announced that the flight we were on was indeed departing from that gate. No worries. One mob scene later, we were on the plane. I'm no crowd control expert, but it seems to me that airlines with assigned seats do better to board by rows than by calling "all aboard!"

Once we got on the plane, we sat for a while. Then the captain informed us, in great detail, that San Diego has a short runway, and the winds at altitude were unusually calm today, so they were checking the weight of the aircraft to make sure their takeoff calculations are right. Otherwise, we might fall out of the sky. I think I would have rather just heard that we were delayed for some vague reason. We had plenty of time to think about what might happen if we were over the limit, though, as it took them another fifty minutes to determine the weight of the aircraft. I wonder what you do if you're over the limit, start hucking the snack boxes overboard? The flight was smooth after that. I played Hotel Dusk: Room 215 for a while. That's a really cool game. Not much for the puzzles, it's more like an interactive mystery novel. I understand that it represents a whole genre that's popular in Japan, but I don't read Japanese, so that doesn't do me any good. Eventually, I got sleepy and dozed off, which worked out well to pass the time until my neighbor, Bob Cuddleston, also dozed off and became my own personal space invader.

We noticed that we were just about the only people on the plane who weren't going home. Not a lot of people visiting Detroit from San Diego this time of year. I overheard one poor soul on his cell phone calling his hotel to tell them that he had left his coat in his room, and ask how he could get it shipped to him. Not a good thing to forget on your way back to the frozen north. Detroit's new terminal is beautiful, and huge. It has a train running inside the building, which we foolishly chose not to use. After a long flight, it was nice to take a good walk, though. Becky's brother Tom and his fiancée Elise surprised us at the terminal exit. Well, they surprised Becky. I knew they would be there, since I had asked them to come.

Randy met up with us at the hotel, and we went to dinner at Zingerman's Deli in Ann Arbor. It's an awesome little place, which I totally recommend if you're ever in the area. The sandwiches are big and hearty, but not ridiculously huge like you see featured on the Food Network when they go to J. Random Deli. While we were eating dinner, it started to snow pretty hard, with giant, fluffy flakes. It was very pretty, but a little nerve-wracking for those of us who have been driving in San Diego for the last dozen years. After dinner, we attempted to go to the Improv Inferno, but there was no show due to a "scheduling mix-up." Keeping with the hellfire theme, we went to see Ghost Rider instead. It was thoroughly not bad, and I enjoyed it a lot. It's loud, over-the-top, and obvious. It's bright and shiny, and its plot is constructed like a video game that's a series of boss battles, but it works and it's fun.

Looks like it snowed some more last night, just enough to cover the cars and make our unfamiliar rental look that much like all the others. Time to go dig out and see if I can find it.