What a very strange sensation… I’ve got an odd combination of tired and wired going on. I attribute it to lack of good sleep, shifting time zones and strange climatic changes. Long story short, my Wife and I zipped back and forth to Birmingham over the weekend. Short story much longer in the extended entry.
My Wife and I aren’t usually members of the jet-setting set. I know there are people who casually jaunt from NY to LA just for kicks. They might even visit places with more than two letters if the mood takes them. For my wife and I, hopping into a pressurized tube of aluminum and hurtling through the stratosphere isn’t our usual weekend gig. We were heading down so that I could visit with my Grandmother-in-law. After all, it’s not every day that a guy gets a new grandparent.
Flying down was fairly painless, although we did have to head through the Worlds Largest and Most Annoying Sculpture Hallway and into the Terminal Without Clocks. I’m giving these locations capital letters because they deserve it. They’re both part of the newishly renovated Northwest Airlines terminal. The Hallway is an underground passageway that goes beneath the runway and links Terminal A to Terminals B & C. The walls are sculpted glass, backlit with colored LED lights. In combination with a strange disembodied sound track, the walls were simulating a thunderstorm as we were heading through. Terminal B had an austere concrete and chrome look, and the aforementioned lack of clocks. Terminal A has clocks. Plenty of them. At least one near each group of boarding gates. Terminal B has no clocks. My Wife asked at the boarding desk and they agreed that the lack of clocks was a pain in the hindquarters.
Alabama itself was strange. We met up with my Mom-in-law at the car rental desk. I was suffering from a mild case of brain melt from the combination of green grass and leafy trees, which didn’t mesh in my mind with the ubiquitous Christmas music.
I’m a big fan of snow and ice for the holidays, not just from an aesthetic standpoint, but also because it changes how people behave on the roads. There were an astonishing number of bad drivers on the roads of Birmingham. One memorable incident was when I was stuck at an intersection, unable to go through a green light, because a line of people were turning left without yielding to oncoming traffic.
I have a theory that there are more bad drivers in the South for the simple reason that driving badly on ice is more instantly fatal. You try whipping around a 25 MPH corner on a hillside going 50 in the middle of an Upper Peninsula winter and you’re not likely to try it again.
But I digress.
We had lunch and dinner at Grandma-in-law’s retirement home, with a brief break between the two for my Wife and I to check into our hotel room and catch a quick nap. Hanging out with GM-I-L was kind of odd. She would doze off occasionally and then wake up with questions about bits of conversation that were borderline non-sequitur. It was kind of like having a tape-delay broadcast. I felt a bit like I should be taking notes so that I could keep track of what everyone had been saying three minutes ago. It took a couple of tries, but eventually she figured out that my Wife and I were visiting her, that we were married, that we’d been married for over a year now, and that I could remember my anniversary.
Post-visit, we headed back to our hotel, with a quick stop off at the mall across the street. Their ice cream parlor was closed, and they didn’t have a movie theatre, but they did have a very nice multi-story bookstore where I picked up the first two Lemony Snicket books for airplane reading. Post mall, we headed back to the hotel, caught Spiderman 2 on the hotel pay-per-view system, and called it a night.
Next morning we were up before sunrise and off to the airport, where I annoyed my Wife by finishing the first of my two books in the departure lounge. The second book lasted for half the flight and after that I snoozed until we got home. Airplane snoozing being slightly less restful than a full-body brillo-pad massage, we took another nap after getting the bug out of hock and driving home from the Airport.
So right now my brain knows it’s Sunday, my body is galavanting about somewhere mid-Monday and I’ll hopefully have both of them synched back up before heading back to work on Tuesday. Tired & wired.