Perils of Caffeine in the Evening

I left Perrysburg for the airport a lot earlier than I had planned last Sunday because freezing rain - the kind that makes a crystalline fairyland of yards and trees, but a slick sheet of ice on the streets and overpasses - was predicted, and indeed started pelting my mom’s house at around 10 am. The roads, however, were in very good shape, and I cruised up to the Detroit aiport at 70. (This is the same ice storm that afflicted a lot of the midwest for most of the week).

So, I was 4 hours early for my 3:30 flight to Atlanta. I’ve been carrying a NW Worldclub membership for a few years as a palliative against the amount of time I spend in airports, and it really comes in handy when flights or schedules go awry, as the did last month. In the Detroit club, it’s fun to watch the ebb and flo at this sort of Bosphorus point (Click photos to enlarge):

Anxious outbound travelers descending the escalators from the TSA checkpoint freshly smarting from their violation and alternately (or in combination) hurrying, bewildered, excited, resigned (if traveling on business!); inbound travelers heading for down escalators to baggage claim just to the right of the photo, grateful, relieved, already-starting-to-peel, steeling themselves to deliver bad news, giddy at starting new lives, or just hoping to find the humble possessions and perhaps the soul that the airline separated from them circling prosaically on the actual carousel that the video display says it’s on.

As I did a couple of years ago, I helped my mom drag her Christmas tree up from the basement and set it up:

I also did some little tasks like replacing light bulbs and moving some furniture around. Then we went out for a convivial dinner Saturday night, and finished decorating the tree to the strains of the OSU Marching Band’s Christmas album. She never tires of hearing OSU band albums. Mick Jagger’s mom probably never tires of Beggar’s Banquet.

And now the week’s gone, and I’m sitting in the Minneapolis Worldclub awaiting my increasingly delayed flight home to Seattle. I just realized that Christmas is not next month, but next week, and the packages that have been accumulating at our house in an accusatory pile are not, in fact, ridiculously premature. I got’s me some work to do this weekend. Have a good one!