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24
Mar 22

Travel day

We drove back to Bloomington from Cleveland today. It’s almost six hours, but we needed to stop every so often for things like gas and food and stretching our legs, meaning it took the better part of three weeks to get back today.

On the drive I saw a car using C-clamps to hold the wraparound bumper in place.

It was a Lexus.

Soon after we stopped, and I saw this in a dusty, uninviting little convenience store.

I haven’t spent a lot of time in Ohio, but it is starting to make sense to me.

There’s not a lot to see on the route, but here’s a bit of the agri-scenery.

If you don’t like that, there’s also Columbus and Cincinnati, but really, if you’ve driven around part of one city on an interstate, you’ve driven around them all, really.

In a smaller way, these little views are far more interesting, if you catch them at the right time of day.

Then, finally, the garage, the cats and some rest. And then back to work tomorrow.

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23
Mar 22

A – ha (or eureka!)

An idea! I had one!

I spent about three hours on work stuff this afternoon in a Cleveland hotel room. It was only three hours because I created the most detailed away message ever for my work email — and still managed to do work on my days off.

My idea was this: I should do less work on my days off.

Something to address next time I take days off, whenever that is.

adventures / memories / photo / Tuesday — Comments Off
22
Mar 22

Surgery day

Today was surgery day for The Yankee. Last fall she had a corrective procedure to repair popliteal artery entrapment syndrome in her left leg. Today it’s the right, from which the surgeon will remove a bit of muscle from the back of the leg, both above and below the knee, to allow the artery to sit in the correct position, improving circulation.

If you haven’t heard of it, join the club. We’ve learned a lot in the last year or so. It’s such a rare and exotic thing that it took her almost took 20 years to get the correct diagnosis. The last doctor she saw, hilariously, said “It sounds like popliteal artery entrapment syndrome, but I don’t think you have it.” That medical practitioner didn’t stay in the rotation very long.

The specialist, and we see the guy at the Cleveland Clinic, 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, leading to a near-perfect recovery. I’m expecting the same results this time.

We’re staying at a hotel a block away. She did pre-op yesterday, and we woke up at dark-thirty this morning to walk over, but not before I made the joke about how I’m looking forward to going back to work so I can sleep in until 7:30 every morning.

The walk seems shorter this time. The tension is a bit lighter. It’s still a surgery, but you know what to expect. There was a bit more sleep last night, for instance, and though it is colder, it doesn’t seem as scary.

In the hospital, we walked by a deconstructed escalator. If you’ve ever wondered, here’s your chance.

At check-in the two ladies giggled at a joke I made. They remembered it all day and took good care of me because if it.

Fifty minutes after the surgery began I got a message to report to the desk for an update from the surgeon. The lady at the front took me to the little room meeting room, where I saw the doctor again. Everything went well, he said, just as before.

I stepped outside to call my in-laws. “Good news! Everything went great! I’ll get to go upstairs and be with her in a few minutes!” Sent a few texts saying the same things. This is where I stood making that same call last October.

I stood in the same place today. What a difference five months makes, for most of us.

We sat in recovery long enough to design an interesting research project. When she got to her room she crutched her way around, before returning to the bed without even using them. Weight bearing four hours after surgery.

And the rest of the day we spent in the room. I think I dozed off, which was probably more rest than she got this afternoon. Of course, she had anesthesia this morning, so call it a push.

Visiting hours end at 9 p.m., which means I had to make the sad walk back to the hotel room all by myself. We bought food yesterday for dinner today and, in between giving recommendation phone calls for students, I didn’t notice the mini-fridge was turned all the way up. My chicken is frozen. And I am trying to coax the wimpiest microwave in Ohio to get this frozen chunk of food to room temperature.

(It took nine minutes.)

Tomorrow, The Yankee should get discharged, and we’ll spent an easy day lazing around the hotel room. They want to keep us close by for one more day, just to make sure everything continues to progress as it should. It will.

adventures / memories / Monday / photo — Comments Off
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!