phik

Between our Thursday meetings, blizzard and I snuck out of town for lunch in Jaffrey, NH. It has an adorable little barely-manned airport, with a runway that isn’t that short, but a lot shorter than I’m used to.

You can’t tell very well from the picture, but runway 34 is actually uphill, and changes angle in the middle. Exciting!

We were pretty sure there was an ice cream store (”parlor”? am I using that correctly?), so that was our trumped-up excuse for being there, but about a hundred yards off the left side of that photo is a nice little take-away restaurant with ample outdoor seating. Pretty tasty! I recommend it highly; follow the ice cream cone trail spray-painted on the asphalt.

I’m sure all of the families with young children appreciated the two go-arounds that it took before I finally put the plane down on the numbers. No surprise, perhaps, given that it’s half the width of the most narrow runway I’ve ever used. I think I’ll spend some time at Norwood this week, getting more familiar with how everything looks on a narrow runway (although even Norwood is 50% wider than Jaffrey).

I wasn’t going to watch 30 Rock, but I accidentally saw an advertisement this weekend, and it was funny and self-deprecating. OK, they aren’t taking themselves too seriously, maybe I can watch this after all.

Someone pointed me at the NBC web site so I could watch the other ads, but something strange happened. Here I am, visiting the NBC web site for the express purpose of consuming their advertising — this is a TV executive’s wet dream, am I right? So I click on one of the ads, and what do I get? Before I get to see the feature — seriously, that is how they referred to their ad — I had to watch another ad for a goddamn car.

Fuck. That. Shit. Close the window, go to hell.

These assholes are so detached from reality it makes my head hurt.

I’ve flown over Sanford, ME a handful of times on my way to Portland and other points north, so I thought I might as well stop there for once.

I forgot to take a picture for you, but here’s a drawing I made on a sticky note.

If this were an actual approach, it looks like I’d be going around

The skies were virtually empty today, which I guess surprised me. ATC gave me only two traffic advisories for the entire trip, one of which was also inbound for SFM.

There is a little combination diner / deli, Cockpit Cafe, near the approach end of runway 14. It was OK, pretty standard diner fare; stop if you’re hungry, but not really worth making a special trip for.

Netflix delivered United 93 to me yesterday — cosmic, no? — but by the end of the day if I’d heard one more word about September 11 I was going to throw up, so I put it on the shelf until tonight.

I had been told that it was an excellent film, and it did not disappoint, but quite honestly I hadn’t foreseen it hitting so close to home. My last five years have included untold hundreds of hours in United aircraft cabins, and now I’m spending my leisure time talking to those same air traffic controllers. My overactive imagination did not have a difficult time making it seem like I was there, on that plane, while they’re rushing the cockpit and clawing each others’ eyes out.

I thought it was extremely well done, but seriously close to home.

I left my toothpaste in Ohio today — along with all of my other pastes, soaps, creams, salves, poultices, ointments, balms, lotions, liquids, beverages, gels, aerosols, syrups, oils, tinctures, waxes, and liniments — rather than discarding it as a victim of Security Theatre Policy Delta, but I hadn’t realized that the tube in question was, in fact, my emergency backup toothpaste. I should have just put it in my pocket and carried it through the metal detector, which is how it got to Ohio in the first place (shh!). But what was my emergency backup toothpaste doing in the normal rotation? This is a serious process violation, about which, if you are fortunate, I will write more later.

Over the years I have accumulated a banker’s box full of random toiletries, more or less by just adding the contents of my bathroom into it every time I move. Most of those things never leave the box, so it’s quite a collection, let me tell you.

Sure enough, there were two unopened tubes of toothpaste in that box. One of them expired in 1997, the other was produced before expiration dates, or perhaps the printing press, were invented. The latter contained a paste that was brown but with the apparent consistency of small-curd, low-fat cottage cheese. The 1997 toothpaste got me through the next three exercises in oral hygiene.

I was completely certain that this story began with some kind of moral to it, but I have lost sight of it in my blinding rage.

Can I please get some fucking spinach? It is all I think about, all I crave any more.

I didn’t even really want it that badly until they told me that I couldn’t have it, but now I must seek it out and consume it immediately. It’s like flying to China at the peak of SARS (how did I not write anything about that at the time?), because hey, low fares, and I understand risk.

The way I see it, 100 people out of 200 million spinach eaters got a case of the bloody stools, so my odds are still pretty good. And with the price of spinach at an all-time low, I see a series of inexpensive side salads in my future.

Oh no no. Old man government has to get involved, coddling the sick and elderly, instead of just letting the market handle things, as it always does and should.

Typical.

The Tragically Hip are playing a few shows in Toronto at the end of October, while I’m going to be there anyway, so there couldn’t be a more perfect opportunity for shaver and me to reprise our heady, youthful Montreal days.

I predicted that they would sell out quickly — the venue has either 1,000 or 4,500 seats (accounts differ) for a band that typically sells out the Air Canada Centre. So there I am, dutifully online at 10h00 sharp, and clickity clack, I got two tickets.

While I was trying to decipher whether the Canada Post delivery option applied to me as a US resident, I managed to overlook the microscopic print at the top of the page informing me that I had exactly two Earth minutes in which to complete the transaction. Instead of displaying this utterly vital information in enormous bold text with a JS pop-up at one minute remaining, they instead chose a thoroughly nondescript colour and font, as one might settle on for providing to the user a particularly interesting copyright notice.

So of course, by the time I clicked through and learned my fate — 10h03 — all four shows were sold out.

While we’re on the subject: $9.25 convenience charge? This monopoly needs to be broken by a clever upstart company with a fabulous customer experience, am I right? And by “broken” I mean annoyed for a couple of years until we’re just irritating enough to be worth acquiring. Who’s with me?