Friday,
February 15, 2002

Home again, home again, jiggedy. . .what do you mean, take off my shoes?

Okay, look, I know all about the dude who put explosives in his sneakers and tried to light the fuse while in flight, but does that mean we ALL have to take off our shoes, have our feet wanded and our footwear tested spectrographically for boom-making chemicals?

Apparently so, at least if you want to get out of San Francisco. Steve's just gonna love this next week when it's his turn in the barrel.

So yeah, I'm home. Apart from yet another near-vertical lift-off (which must be necessary because of the layout of the airport or something), the flight was uneventful -- oh, except for the fact that having this horrible sinus pain and congestion meant that my ears never unpopped (and my, wasn't that a special feeling on the descent). Technically, I should be going into the office tomorrow to finish up some help files and get everything ready for the SF crowd on Monday so that I can actually take President's Day off. Realistically, I see a visit to the Plano Minor Emergency Center in my near future and a request for something prescription-strength that will dry up my sinuses and unclog my head. Semtex will be just fine at this point (which reminds me of a saying I read on a newsgroup at SFF.Net recently: "There is no problem in human existence that cannot be resolved with the appropriate amount of C-4." Yeah, that works for me).

The thing that pisses me off the most about all this is that I had to get sick on my LAST FREE TRIP to San Francisco. Yeah, I had to work during the day, but the nights were mine to go out and carouse as I wished. And what happened? I spent all my free time huddled in my hotel room and waiting for the next bout of coughing to begin. Not to mention my sneaking suspicion that I may have passed whatever this is on to those lovely, wonderful coworkers who hugged me when I first came into the office and spent the rest of the week in my close company.

I can deal with being sick myself. But the thought of being Typhoid Mary really sucks.