It is not exactly communing with nature, but the Charlotte airport is not a bad facility.  I have a hideously long layover here and was dreading finding somewhere to kill the time.  Pleasantly I found in between the concourses an area with rocking chairs, plug-ins, WIFI and trees!  Real trees.

If you like please contrast this post to one about 4 days ago about the terminal in San Luis Obispo.

Before you think I found Shangri-La keep in mind I did pay about 11 dollars for a sandwich and chips (not even a drink).  The ciabatta bread tasted more like plaster of Paris.  I have spent a good amount of time people watching.  I have seen military units, the UNC women’s soccer team, plastic surgery, gastric surgery, people who need surgery, mountain folk, German tourists, crying babies, and the unenthusiastic faces of over-worked airport employees.

I still have three hours to go.

I think we all might have a Jack Church in our life: the guy you are right around the corner from, five minutes before or after.  Everyone tells you they just saw him and is flabbergasted you never met.

Jack is that guy for me.

Back in the mid 90s (ugh, I am dating myself here), I got my first job as a chief meteorologist in Bakersfield.  I held the job for about 3 years before moving on, when I left and moved back to Fargo…Jack took that job I vacated.

Just before I moved to the Central Coast about 7 years ago, Jack apparently had accepted the job at KSBY to lead the weather department (after Sharon Graves departed) but never actually ended up working there.  I was the next guy they hired.  Interestingly, Jack knew the story and I knew he story and we had a lot of mutual acquaintances in the business and plenty in the communities where we worked.  Jack is a friendly and affable guy with a big smile and has done just about every job at a TV station just like me.  We had never met until a couple of days ago.

I insisted on getting a picture.  Of course, we hit it off right away.

I am not a person to make an observation like that since I am generally the most guilty.  I have done a bunch of posts from here and have stayed in touch with family and friends.  I have worked my phone like a bandit pushing the battery to the last couple pixels a few days.

But I think there is a point where it is just annoying.  I saw this several times during presentations, a good percentage of heads tilted down into dim LED light.  I think you need to concentrate when someone is talking about differential equations and Sea Surface Temperature soundings being integrated into the WRF model matrix (I am not kidding about that topic).  If someone is trying to make you LOL simultaneously then I think you could miss a key point.  But, OK, these things can be a bit dry so maybe I will let it go.

But during dinner, putting a fork down (or in some cases not) to text the whole time?  I think for that hour or two you might be able to take a break.

Interestingly, I think 10 years ago someone would have said something at the NWA conference about the faux pas, but with the media hurting so badly many are advocating being online all the time so it goes down as accepted.  There are no rules in the Wild West even at stuffy technical conferences apparently.

(No, I didn’t post this particular blog from my phone…in case you are curious…however I did do several others that way this week.  I am a hypocrite)

I love my Mom, and I warned her this blog was coming.  I want to start it off by saying this, “If it my Mom and Aunt starred in Thelma and Louise they would be asking for directions to the cliff.”  I am not kidding.

My mother was nice enough to come down to Norfolk from her home in Fredericksburg to pick me up at the airport while I was in town for the National Weather Association National Meeting.  In my three connecting flight 11 hour odyssey to get to Norfolk I called ahead from Charlotte to see if everything was OK for my arrival.  I knew there was trouble the instant the phone call connected because my Aunt Joan answered and I could hear my mother muttering to an invisible audience in the background.  Joan informed me that somehow she and my Mom got lost in a heavy industrial area somewhere not entirely near the airport.  They apparently had received directions from someone helpful but failed to negotiate them properly and now that same man (later described like a hillbilly) was escorting them to the airport.  I only had milliseconds before my flight, so I wished them good luck and hoped they weren’t going to end up in a local stew.

Well, despite scientific odds against it and my suspicions…my Mom was standing in the concourse right after I stepped off the plane with a broad smile of a parent who hasn’t seen their son for a year.  I am not sure if she could tell but despite monstrous jet lag I was pretty emotional.  We walked down to get my bag which didn’t make the flight, filled out some paperwork, and headed to the parking garage.  Only a few steps in my Aunt reminded my Mom that a level 5 CSI sweep of the car would have to take place to find the parking ticket.  I had to speak up at this moment, “You’ve been here less than an hour and you lost the ticket?”  I was informed that it was probably just under a seat or something.

It wasn’t.  Standing in a cold and damp parking garage the investigation failed to produce results.  So, we decided to talk to the parking agent to see what penance was necessary to depart.  The man was helpful, but there was a tedious process of writing down license plates and ID numbers.  My Mom started quipping that whatever the full day charge was, they would pay that.  I tried to stay quiet.  I figured they had lost the ticket and it was only reasonable to expect SOME inconvieniance.

Then it was time to find hotels and a place to eat.  Keep in mind this Lewis and Clark expedition got lost on the way to the airport.  And here is the kicker.  Not only does my Mom have GPS…SHE HAS TWO GPS UNITS IN THE CAR.  Of course, they were nicely stowed in the center console and not plugged in.  I fired them both up.  One insisted on giving directions from my Mom’s house and not our current location.  The other was slow, it had a rough idea where we were but didn’t talk.  I decided to use the one in my phone.  She may be curt and bitchy but the electronic woman inside my phone’s GPS has never led me astray.  I was in the co-pilot’s seat.  When the GPS talked I had to interpret:

GPS “Turn left.”

Me “Turn left, Mom.”

Mom “What? Here?…no here.”  (then cutting across three lanes of traffic and complaints to other drivers actually following basic traffic rules later the turn succeeds).

It may sound like complaining, but it really isn’t.  I found it all pretty amusing, and so did my Mom and Aunt.  We found a place to eat, the kind of place where you open peanuts and throw the shells on the floor as you wait for several thousand calories of food to arrive.  Yes, we also had the dessert.

Now, the following pictures are from lunch the next day and our stoll near the harbor.  I think it shows the kind of game spirit my Mom has:

(Joe’s Crab Shack)

(Record cold in Norfolk and Mom was not about to feel that way.  She got the hat because I like the Vikings.  She gave me the hat when she left.)

(What can I say, I love my Mom.  I don’t to see her nearly often enough.  Her navigational difficulties aside I have no complaints.)

–authors note… Mom, I know you will dispute some of the fact in the story and perhaps flag me for embellishment…but I think it is pretty close.    I needed to write it all down before I forgot any details.

On top of the sign itself there is also a payphone out front..also a sign of blight if you have read prior blogs from me on this subject.

My hotel is about a mile from the conference I am attening. I walk the span each day, past several social service agencies here in Norfolk and the courthouse as well. Let’s just say I got more of the local flavor than just the mothballed battleships hulking near the water’s edge.

The great travel author Bill Bryson is right, no one in America walks anywhere anymore. Crosswalks are definately timed for cars traveling 40mph and not me at 3mph. There were also impassible areas without options detailed. I figured it out, but walking is not for the meek to be sure.

So, I am not sure if I am cheering for more signs or not.

I tuned it out for a few hours but now I think I understand why the CDC is so worried about H1N1.  Heck, I think they should be worried about a lot more than that.  I have been flying across the country today and I think I have heard every cough.  In fact, I think it is more notable when 10-15 seconds go by when someone doesn’t cough.  And that is just the airborne stuff.  Ugg, all the touches and wipes and smears.  I think I could become Howard Hughes quickly.  Well, not the money and swagger and genius part..but I could wear tissue paper boxes on my feet pretty soon if this keeps up.

That is just physical infirmity.  When I landed in Phoenix I think I saw plenty of the mental kind as well.  It is 8:30 in the morning and people are running around in full sprints.  The wide-eyed fear that they would somehow be trapped in the home of the Arizona Diamondbacks if they didn’t run like Ben Johnson.  Others twisting in circles, unsure of which way to go as a stream of more confident passengers navigate around them.

Then other questions come up.  On the plane they will not offer you much for free these days, but US Air was letting us have coffee or soda.  If you felt like spending 5 bucks for a bag of chips they’ll do that too.  But back to the drinks.  When did human beings get so darn picky?  If you believe in evolution (and not everyone does), you are basically saying that certain traits lead to survivability.  I don’t think whining about food would have helped.  Some lady a few rows up completely jammed the beverage service with a prosecutorial line of questions about their de-caf coffee which is apparently more like a tea bag and not brewed.  After careful consideration and what seemed like a committee meeting on the matter she gave it a whirl.  Did her ancestors hem and haw about how well their squirrel meat was cooked or which mastodon was for dinner?  Nope, we learned this sort of thing.  And it gets worse by the day.  It is the reason I like In and Out Burger.  There are 5 things on the menu, though people do their darnedest to slow the drive thru down despite the simplicity of it.

I guess what I am saying is that air travel is more like an experiment than anything.  You can check the how viral something is, watch sociology ad psychology in action and all while experiencing modern avionics.

Since I started writing this I have coughed twice and sneezed once.

I can rationalize it (though this is a dangerous thing to start doing as well).

All I have been doing the last to weeks is working and I haven’t really spent any time doing anything else other than basic personal maintenance (eating, but not always).  It really helps to have an hour or two without a heaping pile of expectation.  Einstein once said that if you read all the time you are only getting other people’s thoughts and never finding an of your own.  I have found that with blogs: I need to have things happening in my personal life or they grind to a halt.  This can be as simple as shopping or going to a movie, or even watching one in bed.  I’d love to tell you I am even getting that done these days, but no.  I do have a good blog in the pipeline I need to write: Clive Owen is a human sleeping pill.

That is for another day.