Headed out tomorrow morning at a vicious hour, and will arrive in Florida that afternoon. Tuesday, we’ll get to Richmond for a few days of wild excitement and sweating and hopefully AC, and then we head off to the Outer Banks for more sweating and excitement and AC. Might post, might not. My netbook is all happy with some 2GB RAM and a new 16GB hard drive, and I installed the Easy Peasy OS on it (partly because of the name!). I really want a Drupal development setup before I leave so I can get some work done while traveling, but my inexperience with Linux combined with Apache’s persnicketiness is leading me to suspect this may not happen. Which makes me a bit cranky. I’ll figure something out, I guess.
Also, have been working on my Pak’ma’ra painting, here is the progress thus far:
Kinda iffy on the curlicue clouds, and I really need a reference for those mountains. Aside from that, seems to be going well. I’ve got plans for metallic material in some areas, for bonus shiny. One thing that’s been annoying – turpentine stinks. I started to get a bad headache despite the open window and fan, and after gazing long and hard at the several paragraphs of health warnings in red on the turpentine container, I decided to switch to mineral spirits. Except that I made the mistake of getting super-green enviro-friendly mineral spirits, thinking it would be the opposite of headaches and brain damage. Which it is, but it’s a cloudy white rather then clear, and keeps separating from the linseed oil, which sucks. I may have to switch to regular mineral spirits. Anyhow, it’s been pretty fun to work on, maybe I’ll do more Pak’ma’ra art after this one, too.
Filed under: Adventures,projects,travel | Babylon 5, oil painting, Pak'ma'ra|No Comments
I’m apparently going to be traveling a bit coming up soon, meaning that it’s a very good thing that I’ve got a giant stack of free travel courtesy of Airtran. This Friday, we’re headed for Florida for Drew’s other grandfather’s funeral (we went to Drew’s first grandfather’s funeral 2 months ago, and then 2 months before that Drew wen’t to Neil’s funeral, so it has not been a good year for Drew so far=\). The current plan is that, on the next Tuesday, we head to Richmond, and stay there until Saturday when we leave with his Dad & co. to go to the Outer Banks where they’re rented a house for a week. We stay there a few days, then head back to Denver. However, it seems I might be needed out in California for family-related purposes at an unknown point in the future, and so I’m hesitant about scheduling all of this flight time. Helps to have the travel vouchers and all, at least. I do like traveling by planes, which helps.
So I ordered a bunch of laptop parts, I’m gonna upgrade my netbook’s RAM and hard drive, and then try installing Ubuntu on it. See, it’s becoming a hindrance that I’m trying to do all of this stuff with php and Drupal and am doing it off of my Windows XP computer. I haven’t used Linux much at all, but apparently it’s much easier to do backend web programming with it then with a Windows box, and it’s time I figured out how to do that. Assuming I figure it out in the next 4 days and get the netbook set up, I’ll have a teeny workstation to use while traveling to work on the Drupal site I recently started.
So I’m almost done watching Babylon 5 – we’ve got a few episodes left, and maybe a movie. I totally caved and ordered figures, which arrived today. They’re certainly not action figures, being that Sheridan is the only one where you can move both the arms and the legs, but they’re still cute. I’ve also got Delenn, G’kar, and Londo. Now I just need to figure out how to get the rest of the figures that I want via finding the internet sellers that are trying to unload them for cheap, rather then the sellers that think they’re super valuable and are pricing them accordingly. I found someone selling Ivanova and Vir for not too much, so they might be my next order. I can substitute some of my pre-existing figures for other characters. Aragorn makes an excellent Marcus (though I might still get a Marcus character if I see him), and Legolas makes an excellent Number 1. Honestly, I never liked Number 1, I kept thinking of her as “Mars Resistance Leader Hannah Montana.”
Season 5 hasn’t been quite as exciting as Season 4, but Drew warned me of that. All of the Londo/G’kar stuff has been excellent, at least. I didn’t care for the telepaths, and they took up most of the first half of the season. I also think there’s been a huge hole where Ivanova used to be, she was a great character and I don’t think Lochley was a good replacement. As much as I liked Delenn, her character stopped being as interesting once her and Sheridan became official, which happened around the same time the Minbari caste conflict ended as well.
It’s been a bit exhausting watching through so many seasons of something, so it’s good timing that we’re finishing up right before we leave, since I could use a TV break!
Filed under: misc,travel | Babylon 5|No Comments
Drew and I attended his grandfather’s funeral in Indiana this past weekend, and it was a hectic weekend indeed.
A few days in advance, I booked flights for us on Airtran. Despite the short notice, I got us tickets for around $250 each (hooray for “web only” specials!). Our flight left at 11:00 am from DEN, so we left home a little after 8 in anticipation of traffic, the long trudge in from the cheapo “long-term” parking lot, and long security lines. Rush hour was quite mild, the lot we wanted was closed (thus costing us $10 per day rather then the much preferable $6 per day), and not as many people as you’d think travel on Friday morning it seems, so we had time to kill. A session of intermittent wandering and an unnecessary Burger King trip later, and we’re on the flight to Atlanta airport, where we’ll wait for a little under two hours for our next flight. And of course, it’s cancelled. Engine problems.
This is Atlanta airport, which is, to put it simply, ginormous. Meaning, there are lots of flights that go through there. Meaning, we were presented with a few options. We could fly out a few hours later to Indianapolis (and get compensated with free one way tickets for each of us, plus meal vouchers), or we could wait until that next morning to fly out (and get compensated with free round trip tickets, a free stay at a hotel, plus meal vouchers). The latter would have been fabulous, but we did have a funeral to attend the next morning, so later that day it was. The man who helped us with the new tickets and such was very helpful and definitely made up for the inconvenience of being stuck at ATL for the next several hours.
So we roamed. 6 concourses, and we checked each one for the elusive large food court that I vaguely remembered from being in that airport many years ago. Turned up in Concourse E. Incidentally, airport food is weird, pricewise. We noted that a McDonalds double cheeseburger cost $3.99 there, far above the standard $1.20 or so at a non-airport restaurant. However, at Qdoba, the prices were barely more expensive then usual (they may have even been the same price, for that matter). The lesson here: If you’re stuck at an airport, your wallet wants you to avoid Mickey Ds. Anyhow, using our fabulous meal vouchers, Drew got a Qdoba burrito + brownie, and I got a turkey wrap + hummus + brownie at a nearby sandwich shop. My wrap was rather tasteless, but I had that rather convenient hummus to smear it in, so all worked out well.
Did you know that the Atlanta Airport hides an art gallery? To get to the different concourses, you can take a tram or you can walk. In the area near Concourses T and A was a bunch of Zimbabwean art, including large sculpture. Pretty cool! In a few of the other walkways were large pictures of various nebula and other images from space. Also, it’s really awesome to be much closer to sea level then you usually are, we walked all over that airport and never ran out of breath once!
Anyhow, we caught the flight, where we had been very nicely bumped to business class. We were served drinks three times during our 1.5 hour flight, and we got alcoholic drinks each time, just because we could. They were served with the alcohol in tiny bottles, along with the juice in a cup with ice, and I wasn’t feeling inclined to drink much, so I saved a few of the bottles as souvenirs. Well, the sort of souvenir that one drinks later, at least. They’re still sitting in my bathroom, for some bizarre reason.
While at ATL, we also briefly ran into Drew’s cousin Leah and her daughter, who had flown in from CA and were headed to Indianapolis as well. Conveniently, our flights were to arrive at the same time (around 11:30 pm), so we didn’t end up inconveniencing anyone into having to make an extra drive to the airport (an hour away from our destination) to pick just us up. Also, It’s really interesting how airports are islands that are rather separate from the location they exist in. I think hub airports like Atlanta have a strong case of this – so many people from everywhere, using that location to get to somewhere else.
Anyhow, the weekend was rather sleepless. Funeral Saturday morning, and flight to catch on Sunday morning. We managed to get beds each night (thus making redundant the sleeping bag I’d brought with in anticipation of being on someone’s hotel floor), but had a really hard time sleeping. I started a new job Monday, but I wasn’t too worried about lacking sleep as we’d get back in Denver around 1:30 am due to the time zone jump, and I could nap as needed. But no, it was not to be.
We dutifully get to the Indianapolis airport on Sunday entirely too early, and waste time sitting around and looking unconscious. (Incidentally, IND is one of the prettier airports out there – lots of giant windows and a really neat glowing light display on your journey to the parking lot). Anyhow, we meander up to our gate and wait for the flight. I’m kind of excited about this flight – it’s on a smaller plane with only two seats on either side of the aisle, and it’s to Milwaukee, which is an airport I don’t think I’ve been in before. Anyhow, it gets delayed. And then, of course, it gets cancelled. And then it is handled in a very unfortunate manner.
I might have expected too much – IND is much smaller then ATL, with fewer options for reseating displaced passengers. It’s a Sunday, so there are fewer options there as well. And, we had the misfortune of already being bedraggled from a weekend of little sleep. Nonetheless, they seemed lacking in how to properly deal with this situation.
Someone tells us over the microphone that they are figuring out places on other flights to place us, and we’ll be dealt with soon. Soon turns into an hour, and some other group of people leave for some other destination at our gate. A line forms at the gate, which we’re not too keen to stand in as a.) the aforementioned tiredness and b.) we were never told to get lined up in the first place. Eventually, an Airtran employee works his way down the line, figuring out where people our going. All of the later flights to Denver are, quite unfortunately for us, booked. So, along with everyone else, we’re told to sit down while they work out solutions. A little while later, another employee calls up everyone going to Des Moines. So we sit as they work through that pile of people, waiting for Denver to be called. And we sit. Then, awhile later, I overhear one of the employees speaking to a few people near us about arrangements to Denver. Apparently they decided to scrap the “letting people know what was going on” method, and just talk to people in the order they shoved themselves in front of employees. My phone rang, and it was someone from Airtran calling about a flight arrangement. We could get to Denver today, which was good. However, we’d be waiting at IND for the next 6 hours to catch a flight…back to our favorite place ever, the Atlanta airport. Then on to Denver, to arrive there at the ever-refreshing hour of 11:30 pm!
We’re told over the phone to go to the ticket counter to get our tickets. The woman at the counter is confused when we mention our tickets, but eventually finds them, and hands them over, roughly brushing us aside. We had to wait until everyone else had cleared out before we could get back up there to ask about compensation for this.
The IND experience was far more disorganized then the ATL experience. However, at IND, we got free round-trip tickets, meaning we more or less profited from that weekend of flying, coming out of it with 1.5 round trip tickets for each of us. The wait at IND was long and tedious, though. No place much to wander at all in that tiny airport, and no energy to wander anyhow. The airport seats are not such that one could lie down on them, so sleep wasn’t too hot either. We did run into Drew’s grandmother Lung there, one the way back from the funeral as well, so we sat with her for a bit. No first class for our flights back, and we got in entirely later then I’d wanted, considering I had to be at work at 8 the next day.
Anyhow, this is my (entirely too long) writeup about our weekend adventures with Airtran.
Filed under: Adventures,travel | airports, Airtran, ATL, flying, IND|No Comments
