siriosa 2000

jfk-heathrow sunday-monday 13-14 september

maureen and cynthia had tickets for the last matinee of Avenue Q. maureen wanted to get a car service to take me to the airport, but i insisted on tracing the route via public transit. their anniversary falls in the week i'm getting back, and they'll be in provincetown celebrating. i'll be flying in to jfk in the evening, and expect to be jetlagged to a fare-thee-well. it's good to have an idea of how it goes, because i will certainly be playing with a deck of 40, at best.

i only left the house 20 minutes later than i thought i would. the F train came immediately. 15 minutes later i realized i'd left my book in the apartment. botheration.

fifteen minutes after i got through security, i noticed that i'd left my empty water bottle in the bin. so i paid the idiot tax on that ($3.50), and then i paid the idiot tax on reading material: 2 magazines and a paperback book--david sedaris's latest--($33). my mantra in these situations is "if that's the worst thing that happens to me this year/trip/excursion, i am truly goddess' very favorite child."

i took a turn around the terminal, because i was going to be sitting down for 7 hours and change. they were boarding a flight to rome, and i recognized a face: it was cara's doctor, ann weissman. i delayed her a moment, to tell her what i was doing. she wished me bon voyage and boarded her own plane.

back to the boarding area. there was a seat open next to a fascinating woman i'd noticed earlier, being wheeled through security. she wore an extremely red hat, and had a good 30 years on me. we chatted. i fetched a bottle of water for her. she told me that cancer is caused by insufficient chewing, and that it takes 100 chews to adequately process one bite of a reuben. she's off to london to take a cruise, where she looks forward to dancing with the hosts the cruise line employs for the purpose. she's fine from the neck down, she said, but her eyes are not sharp (she uses a magnifying glass to read even large print) and she uses hearing aids. she's 94. we had a nice random stranger take our pictures on each other's cameras.

they hadn't come to wheel her onto the plane when my section (way in the back) was called. i asked one of the flight attendants to make sure she got on. he said he'd love to, but he couldn't leave the plane. i suggested he call the boarding area, or have someone else do it. he came by later to tell me she'd made it onto the plane (and suggested that she was being somewhat demanding).

a role model. sweet.

i did take my doxylamine succinate shortly after i got on the plane, but then, alas, they served dinner (which wasn't half bad, actually), and by the time i'd fished my sleep mask out, i wasn't yawning any more. also, whenever i did start to fall asleep, my chin would drift down toward my chest, which would wake me up. it was so very sad. about 4am london time i gave up.

and watched the moving map until we were over ireland. got a nice picture of the sun just hitting the upper atmosphere over the irish sea.

once we got into heathrow airspace, they had us fly in circles for 20 minutes, which was only mildly amusing. on the ground, because i had not checked any luggage, i did not have to go through customs, but i was required to re-take security clearance, because my connecting flight was in another terminal, sadly. still: not having checked luggage: very fine idea.

at heathrow i bought a sammich with my very heavy english coins, so i have fewer of them, yay. then i settled down to change the date and time on my cameras, at which point i discovered i'm missing one. redundancy's a good thing.

i'm ambivalent about the loss: it's a good little camera, but it was given to me by someone who then turned around and treated me like a thing. so ... yeah. i suppose i should call delta and see if (improbably) someone turned it in. just in case.