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Monday

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21
Mar 22

From one destination location to the next

We are back in the United States. Specifically Cleveland, the Cozumel of Ohio. This was the plan. How we arrived here, shockingly, did not go to plan. This was the fault of American Airlines.

Got to hand it to those airline people, boy. They can’t do the one thing you hire them to do.

I’m not over it. I am, in fact, slightly traumatized by the entire American Airlines Inferiority Experience.

TL;DR — They were just as bad, or worse, this Saturday as last Saturday.

I was standing in a line at the Cozumel airport talking with a man from Mobile. He’d gone down there some years back, fell in love with the place and bought a bar. Said he’d never seen the airport like this. It was conert-hall packed.

You know those vinyl roped retractable stanchions you weave through? The maze maximizes the foot traffic in a limited space. The line at the security checkpoint at the Cozumel airport went well beyond that maze. The line somehow formed itself into several of its own zig zags. And the point where the self-policed line joined the maze was the most dangerous place in the airport, because everyone was eyeing the clock and stressed and sure you were breaking in line. I saw two almost-fights right in front of me. It was amazing ugly-American people watching.

Also? our plane? Departed late.

It arrived in Chicago … late.

See where this is going?

Once again they couldn’t get the plane attached to the airport, and then they couldn’t get the door opened for a long time.

Then there’s customs and border control. And we got separated.

We had too much divide and conquer for a vacation, if you ask me.

In the wisdom of the TSA and whatever other agencies were involved in this, you have to claim your bags from your international and re-scan them for your domestic flight. And you have to go through security again. I get it, coming from Cozumel. That procedure Saturday afternoon was laughable, as almost all airport security is when the agents look up and realize that thousands of angry people are waiting to get through their chokepoints. Theater only goes so far.

Anyway, we get to the point where you have to check your luggage back in, and the American Airlines agent says, matter of factly, “You’re not making that flight. They’re in final boarding.”

Never mind that her colleagues made us late. Or that boarding just started. The defeatist said it wasn’t happening, and blamed the airport.

She could get us on a plane tomorrow. Through Winnipeg or some such. That’s not going to happen. For a host of reasons we had to be back that night. Relieved to just be through with American Airlines, I said, “Forget it. Get me a rental car, I will drive us to our car at Indy.”

And that’s how I came to drive four hours to Indianapolis after arriving two hours early at a Mexican airport, to barely make it through security in time, only to find that the plane at the gate prior to ours was an hour-plus late, making our flight late, and the pilot of the flying sky tube was out for a Saturday stroll the whole way up North America.

So we got to the Indy airport, dumped the rental, caught the shuttle to the park-n-fly, and then drove the one final hour to the house. It was 2 a.m.

Which was when I got to deal with things like unpacking, starting laundry, cat puke. And ants.

So at 4-something I went to bed, and woke up about six hours later. Happily, Sunday was relaxing. It was just finishing the laundry, making some videos, spending a little quality time with the cats, and then packing again.

Because now it’s Cleveland!

You might remember that my lovely bride had a planned surgery last year. It was a left leg thing, a circulatory issue. It’s an obscure and rare problem, relatively speaking, which is part of why it took 20 years to find someone that took it seriously, and could put her in front of the right experts. Turns out the two top surgeons for this work are at John Hopkins, and at the Cleveland Clinic. And, as we learned in the extra-curricular reading, there are other surgeons doing it poorly. Well, we got in with the guy at Cleveland. Actually, last summer, we had an appointment with a resident and he said “I’ve done a few of these. But let me see if the chair is in. He does all of these.” And he was, and he was great. Explained everything. Answered everything.

I went into reporter mode, asking every question under the sun, and reframed certain questions to see if they would elicit different answers. That first day, when his colleague just pulled him out of his office, he patiently and kindly and thoroughly answered questions for 48 minutes. That was just the Q&A part. He explained it all. It’s similar to when you cinch up a garden hose. There are five arteries in your leg, and in The Yankee’s legs the artery behind her knees get cinched up because of her muscular development. (She has muscular legs.) She had all the symptoms. The timeline tracks. Every benchmark he presented, she complained about. He drew a diagram and said “This is how your arteries are supposed to look. We’ll do some scans, but I bet yours look like this.” He did some scans and her legs looked exactly like his sketch.

The procedure, the doctor said, is essentially like tearing a muscle. He took out a bit of muscle below and above the popliteal fossa. The popliteal artery goes where it is supposed to, circulation is returned to normal, and now one of her legs doesn’t tingle and her foot feels like a foot is supposed to feel, not ice-cold.

She did the procedure on her left leg in October. She was weight bearing the next day, and took increasingly longer walks for two weeks before PT began. Ultimately a near-perfect recovery.

At her checkup-slash-prep appointment today he had her talk to a teenager about the procedure. She deserves kickbacks.

The doctor was pleased to see her do the deep knee bends he uses as a metric. She has to get it stretched and warmed up, and has a little nerve issue, but it’s otherwise all working as it should, that left leg. He was impressed she ran a 10K with me in December. (Ran better than I did that day, in fact.)

Which means it is time to do the right leg. Which is tomorrow.

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14
Mar 22

American Airlines is the worst thing in the American airspace

Subtitled: Finally, now finally, on our Spring Break 2020 (And this time we mean it) trip

We are in Mexico today. We are finally in Mexico. Just as of today. Should have been here on Saturday. But the journey to our sojourn was negatively impacted by forces beyond our control. In other words …

TL;DR — American Airlines is a terrible way to travel.

It starts like this. We booked this in 2019. Then Covid. We rescheduled twice, because Covid. We were supposed to fly Delta, as we often do, but they canceled this route because of Covid. So American Airlines became our only option to Cozumel. Months ago, American Airlines rescheduled the first flight out of Indy, to make it even earlier in the morning.

So we woke up at 4 a.m. to arrive at the airport to do airport things and got on our plane which couldn’t leave on time. There was a fuel door that wouldn’t close, you see. The ~~captain~~ pilot must leave the plane, study the problem, Google the panel code, call his mom’s neighbor’s uncle about it, and then request a repair team to come and bolt the panel shut.

Then, and this part is very true, the pilot comes over his comm system and says “Well, that’s done, but this plane has an awful lot of computers, so it’ll take a little time for us to get started and in the air.”

Gentle reader, dear friend, if an airplane pilot ever complains, or speaks aloud in wonder about the amount of electronics on his flying sky tube, disembark the vehicle immediately. This is simply good life advice.

Only, you see, there’s a script the pilot is using now. Sure you can get off the flying sky tube. Reschedule a flight. Who knows how that will go. And if you leave this flying sky tube you’re not getting back on this flying sky tube. Tricky door panels and all that.

So we stay on. We depart (very) late. We arrive in Dallas very late for our connection. And this is where the troubles began.

We landed, and waited and waited and waited for the plane to connect to the airport, because of personnel problems. Meantime, our connecting flight just … left. Left five minutes early, even.

What airline does that?

(Later — Note how that flight departed early and was still delayed in arriving? Should have been a red flag for everyone.)

So now we’re stuck in Dallas with nothing but our luggage and dreams. There are no more flights to Cozumel, on the Saturday of the first week of Spring Break for most of the US. There are flights to Cancun and, after standing in a line for many hours, we are on standby for each of them.

Abandon hope, all ye who enter the purgatory of ineptitude that is American Airlines, and the studied indifference and downright rudeness of their employees at Dallas-Fort Worth.

Also, that sign in the foreground? May as well be hieroglyphics out here in the real world. You wonder how long before some bored maintenance crew takes them all down at this point, and where the last tattered one will be.

We also spent hours on the phone, to no avail..

We finally arrived at a place euphemistically called Customer Service. We went here three times on Saturday, standing in exceedingly longer lines each time, to be told different stories, tall tales, excuses and downright lies. Six hours or more in this line alone, for lies.

It was well-staffed. If you like irony and travelers’ distress. I painted over the very young person standing here just in front of us to demonstrate the time when the eight-station desk, the one featuring hours-long waits with a line stretching beyond eyesight into the distance haze of the airport. It was staffed by exactly one American Airlines “professional.” At max capacity, there were three people working at that desk.

And dear and gentle reader, at this point I have written 651 words on this shambolic experience, giving you only the highest points. The details will be spelled out to the executives at American. (I found a helpful mailing list.) Suffice to say, to you, that you likely haven’t had the displeasure of dealing with customer service of this sort in a long, long time. The business model, on the phone and in the airport, and at every level, seems to be “Get these people out of my line and into someone else’s.” We spent an entire day and night at the Dallas-Fort Worth airport dealing with these miserable people. And they are miserable. They are angry, and they are angry at you. Do not dare inconvenience them with your inconvenience, no matter how polite or flustered. Also, they’re the ones getting paid to be at the airport today.

Finally we got a voucher for a hotel. We had to re-coordinate with our condo people, who have been amazing. We had to cancel dives. (This is a dive trip. You go to dive and do little else. Because of this airline we have lost 45 percent of our dives.)

We spent Sunday doing nothing in exotic Dallas. Spring Break! We did nothing because The Yankee had to go back to the DFW airport on a luggage journey, another quixotic four-hour tale. One of our bags got to Cozumel yesterday.

American Airlines: Where incompetence meets apathy, in the sky!

Hertz canceled our car reservation, another American Airline knock-on effects, so we also spent about four hours on the phone with American Express and Hertz trying to make this right.

Which brings us today, and the Cozumel airport, after we finally arrived two years, and then two-days, late.

The Yankee retrieved the piece of luggage that arrived yesterday without us (I’m impressed we got anything back from these yahoos) while I stood in the Hertz line, because, we were told, time was critical. The people in front of us at the little Hertz desk, no dice. This bodes well. That poor family was irate, but no carros means no cars.

Meant the same for us. The guy starts to explain it to me. I said, “Please stop, and thank you. But you’re going to have to explain it to her,” and about that time my lovely bride came back with our lost luggage and I stood well, well away, over at the Avis desk, where I got one of the last cars they had available. We previously had a week-long Hertz reservation for less than the daily rate of this Avis car, and American Airlines will get that bill, too. (And the two-night Dallas stay, and the three extra Uber rides. And another for missed dives. It’s going to be fun.)

To sum up: American Airlines is terrible, and by 4 p.m. Saturday afternoon Smith’s First Rule of Economics, “Don’t make it hard for me to spend my money with you,” was invoked.

If American Airlines is the only way to get to somewhere I need to be, I’ll go anywhere else but there.

But enough about that, for now.

We’re staying at a place called Residencias Reef. Let us sing their praises.

It is a nice oceanfront place. We rented a one-bedroom condo. The furnishings are fine and it is well appointed. There’s a note on the printer that says you can’t get these cartridges in Mexico, but some are due in from Estados Unidos this month. Had I known, I would have picked some up for them. It seemed necessary after seeing all of the things there. Need Gorilla Glue? Got it. Forget your beach reading? Two shelves worth. Fresh fruit? At the ready. Sun block? Bug spray? Right over here. Bikes? Paddles for the paddle boards? Of course. Dry bags? You bet.

They’ve been beyond patient and kind to us. As we’ve noted, this is our Spring Break 2020 trip. We postponed it at the 11th hour that because of the rapidly deteriorating Covid situation, wondering “Will they even let us back in the country at the end of the week?” (The next week the mercurial federal government supposedly shut the door to Europe and Canada, after all. And there was something about a wall?) The condo owners were very understanding in 2020. We were ready to make this trip last year, but then a Covid spike hit. They kindly let us postpone once more. But this, they said, was the last time.

It was more than you could ask for, really.

And then we had to write them Saturday and say “We’ll be there Monday, because American Airlines is terrible at their job.”

Residencias Reef has been great. If we come to Cozumel in the future, or steer anyone else here, it will always be with them in mind.

Also, they have two heated pools.

And we waded into the ocean, which was chilly.

Tomorrow, we dive!

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7
Mar 22

Standard issue Monday

I worked a full day, and just a day and that was great. I left my office at 5:16! This is the earliest I’d left in four weeks, I think. I slept about four hours last night, so, though there was day left, there was not much left in me.

But that’s OK, because the day was a success, for a Monday. Four meetings and all the To Do list items satisfactorily To Done.

So it’s an early night, and not a lot of extra stuff. But! This is a fun challenge. Do you know where you’re at? Give it a try. I’m going to answer one of these questions when I have the rare lull.

And I’m also listening to this podcast with Jon Stewart, which is interesting if you like the level of thoughtfulness of a Jon Stewart.

In other nonsense …

And we must also check in with the kitties, who are insistent that I follow The Rules and post them on the Correct Day. One of these cats is very demanding. I’ll let you decide which one.

I had a nice cuddle with Phoebe, who spent her time alternatively telling on her brother and sleeping.

Poseidon, sitting on his favorite warm spot, in total defiance of The Rules.

Phoebe knows where to go when it gets too cold.

And if Phoebe is there Poseidon wants to be under that same blanket, too. (Like that’s the only blanket.)

They can’t coexist in such a small place. We make them take turns, because we need other, better hobbies.

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28
Feb 22

It will be a light, long week here

The day started bright and sunny, and the week is trending that way, according to the forecasts. I will see it in the morning, and that’ll be about all I see of it this week. There’s a lot going on, and it’ll be lighter than usual here.

So almost non-existent?

If you want to be cynical about it, dear straw man construct.

What would be the point of inventing this dialogue, otherwise?

To pad the post with paragraph breaks and an empty construct?

Who’s being cynical now? And on Monday, even.

Exactly.

It was a day full of meetings, most of them over Zoom. I don’t know if you’ve been in a meeting where the person in every Zoom window simultaneously raised their eyebrows and watched 10 pairs of eyes get wide simultaneously, but that happened in my first meeting of the day.

Someone mentioned something about a specific deadline on a particular project which pushed things up considerably. No one else was familiar with this date. I consulted two notebooks and my batch of post it notes and saw no such date. We decided maybe the speaker had misspoken. Perhaps he was thinking of another deadline for another project, and another group of people. It would be understandable, everyone has more than one project.

One of my large projects will wrap this week. I’ve been producing a singing contest show. And my last meeting of the day was with the organizers of that event. We have the names of the contestants now. Eighteen will enter, 10 will advance to the finals. Fortunately, I do not have to produce the finals. I spent three-and-a-half hours on the semifinals this thing, going over details we should have well in hand by now. But at least some of them are in, so I can finally write the show’s rundown. Another meeting on this tomorrow, and more all week. At some point all of the music will come in. And the scripts. And the entire speaker’s list. At least I have a crew for the show.

We have hit none of the deadlines I established for this project. It will still be better organized than when we did this same event last year.

Here’s a show the students posted this weekend. I like the shows like this, where the crew working on it just seem to be having a ton of fun.

They, and their fellow IUSTV crews, will produce at least six studio shows this week. It’s a delight to watch them grow.

Anyway, I left the office at 7:30 tonight and, yes, I am keeping score.

Let’s check in on the cats, as we so often do on Mondays. Phoebe found some morning sun and proves once more that it’s a pretty good life to be a cat in this house.

Poseidon would agree, except I framed this so that his sister said it. So, to be difficult, he would probably find fault with that, and try to bite her. It’s a good thing he’s occasionally charming, I tell him, he can be a trying cat.

Not that you’d ever know it from handsome looks like that.

(I have to play this cool and dish out some compliments. He’s sitting next to me as I type this.)

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21
Feb 22

The third half of winter

It is about time I thought on my walk from the car to the building this morning, to see a fake signal. And as I walked by one of the little patches of soil that separates the parking lot from the sidewalk, I saw it. Right on time, just like every other year we’ve been here, trying to trick me.

Even though I misinterpret it (“Spring!”) I will not be tricked. We have more cold and some snow flurries and ice this week and who knows what else in the next … six or eight weeks.

He said with the world’s most predictable sigh.

But, hey, the days are getting longer. The coats are getting lighter. And the cold is, for now, a bit milder.

This was the sun on our walk yesterday. I was only wearing a medium-weight coat.

And here are two more pictures from that walk, because I am fascinated by the idea that so many things look better in real life than they do in photographs. For instance, this sycamore is really popping in the late-day sun. And, yet …

Same with this tree, which I think is just dead. The sun is playful, the limbs are colorful, but the photographic result leaves something to be desired.

You know what else leaves something to be desired? My ability to keep things up-to-date. This show is from Wednesday night and went online Thursday and I forgot to post it here. Shame on me.

And here’s the talk show, where they focused on baseball and softball.

Which brings us to today, and here are the shows the entertainment division released today. And it seems like the late night show was evicted after a troublesome conclusion to their last episode.

That show continues to evolve in the most fascinating ways. One day they’re going to invent their own genre, I’m pretty sure.

And here’s the morning show, a production which I missed entirely, unfortunately.

I walked in from a meeting just as the students were breaking down the studio. And I am lesser for it. Watch it now, and you will be justly enriched.

I tried a new Zwift route on Saturday. I quickly regretted it. But at least I got a nice shot of my avatar in an aerotuck.

It was one of the fictional routes, and required a lot of climbing which I am clearly not good at or prepared for. But at the end of it all there’s a map. This is always amusing to me. It’s a fictional route. This is a real island in the South Pacific.

Two islands, actually. I mentioned one of them, Teanu, which is the bulk of the route you see in the graphic above, last Monday. But that part where it dips south, is Vanikoro. Apparently about 1,300 people live there, two distinct groups, in different villages, but you can’t see much from Google Maps.

Google Reviews, though … someone wrote “There is no TV 3 stars.”

That settles it for me.