11/26/00

Yet another week has passed by between my updates. I was meaning to write something from home, but I never seem to be able to get any work done at my parents' house. I guess I was just too busy watching TV and stuffing my face.

I headed home on Tuesday afternoon and had a relatively uneventful flight home. It was really cold at home. Apparently, the unseasonably unpleasant weather had gotten there just in time for me. Luckily, there wasn't much call to leave my parents' house.

The one big exception to that was Thursday morning when my sister convinced me to run in a 5-mile race with her in the small town of Wilbraham. The town is a 45-minute drive from my parents' house and it's sufficiently small that it's not indexed by mapquest, so we had to leave at around 6:30 a.m. because we didn't really know where we were going. I was still jet-lagged, so it was 3:30 a.m. my time. It was also still really cold out--about 15 degrees fahrenheit (that's about -7C for those of you who speak celsius).

I really wasn't in the mood for a vigorous run under those circumstances, but I knew that with the cold, I would never be able to motivate myself to go running otherwise, and I was planning on eating a huge amount of food at dinner, so I went along with it.

Earlier, I'd asked my sister if there were any big hills in the course. She wasn't familiar with this particular course, but assured me that the two other races she'd run in that town had been pretty flat. So, I was kind of disheartened by the fact that when we arrived at the church where the race registration was taking place, all the other runners were talking about "the hill." Then some guy came over to us and started talking about how there was a really big hill in the course. And then when we finally got to the starting line, the race director gave a little description of the course and said "the course is considered...uh...hilly" and everyone in the starting mob started to laugh.

Sure enough, just a half mile or so into the course, there was a pretty decent-sized hill. When I finally reached the top, I looked up and saw another, even bigger, hill. Despite the fact that everyone else seemed to know about the hill, a lot of people didn't plan for it very well, because I passed a lot of people who had been reduced to walking on the way up. I felt like I was going to die, but I was determined to run the whole way up, and not walk like all those other losers. Then the rest of the course was downhill. It was a weird race.

My sister finished nearly twelve minutes before me and then ran back and ran the final stretch again with me as her "cool-down" (I ran it in 44:36, which I thought wasn't so bad considering the terrible hill, but it's hard to feel good about your performance when someone who shares half your genetic material can run it so much faster). I spent the second half of the course chatting with a woman who had recently located to the area from Washington, D.C. During the course of our conversation, she mentioned that she and her family were looking for a house. They had looked in a town near the one where my parents live, but she and her husband had decided that it was "too diverse" for them. Given that Western Massachusetts is not exactly a hotbed of diversity compared to Washington, D.C., I assumed that she was referring to the town's large and high-profile gay and lesbian community. "I have a young son, you know" she explained. I didn't know quite what to say.

I spent the rest of the morning meeting my childhood friend Michelle's 5-month-old baby, a little girl named Hero. Yes, I know it's an unusual name, but isn't the baby cute? That's her with my dad in the picture. Hero is another one of those perennially happy or sleeping babies everyone I meet these days seems to have--at Journalcon, Diane Patterson referred to her own daughter as "an advertisement for having babies." But I guess Michelle deserves it after suffering through 9 months of excruciating morning sickness and a 20-hour labor which ended with a C-section.

I didn't really get to talk to Michelle much, because her presence was obviously shadowed by that of the baby. I guess that's another trade-off to being a parent--you'll never be the cutest one anymore...well, at least not until your kids start to hit puberty and are afflicted with acne and orthodontia.

Let's see, what else happened this weekend...I got to see Brad, my sister's ex-boyfriend, for the first time since they broke up. He didn't have anywhere to go, and my sister's current boyfriend was spending the holiday with his family, so she invited him along. It was just like old times, because Brad's spent Thanksgiving at our house just about every year for the last 5 or 6 years or so.

We went to see "Charlie's Angels" on Friday night. It was OK. We also watched "Austin Powers" on TV on Thursday night and discovered that the network censors don't approve of the words "penis," "horny," or "Fagina."

But undeniably the most thrilling part of the weekend was my trip to the airport this morning. My sister Alison was headed back to New York City, and so got roped into dropping me off at the airport in Hartford along the way. This wouldn't have been such a big deal, except for the fact that my flight left at 6:50 a.m., meaning that we had to leave the house at 5 a.m.

Despite the unpleasantly early hour, the trip was going OK until we got about 15 miles from the airport and the freezing rain started. Within a few minutes, the highway was completely covered in a slick layer of ice, and most of the cars on the road had either pulled over to wait out the storm or had already been in accidents. The ice made it nearly impossible to stop or turn, which obviously made for some pretty treacherous driving conditions.

We had no idea when the storm would let up, or when the salt trucks would arrive, and I had a plane to catch, so Alison plodded along, going no more than 15 m.p.h. or so, so that if we did skid off the road, we wouldn't sustain much damage. We must have passed 20 or more accidents on the way to the airport--I'd never seen anything like it. We were both pretty terrified, but I was trying my best to act calm and composed. The thing I was most afraid of was being hit by one of the other cars on the road, but luckily, there weren't too many of them. But each accident we passed made us more and more tense.

Finally, while going around a shallow curve, the car slowly skidded off the road and then back on again. My sister was pretty freaked out about losing control of the car, so we pulled over for a few minutes so she could get her composure back. I felt like I should offer to drive, but I have limited experience driving in ice and snow, and it was her car, so I figured we'd both be better off with her behind the wheel. We decided that we would park at the airport, and she would wait there until the roads cleared up before continuing on to New York.

We finally did make it to the airport and slid into a parking space, but even then we weren't out of the woods. The ground was so slippery, we had trouble walking across the parking lot just to get to the terminal. But we finally did make it, and I was in plenty of time for my flight, which ended up being delayed anyway on account of the ice. My poor sister was stuck at the airport for nearly 6 hours waiting for the weather to improve. She says she's never taking me to the airport again.

I guess I was still kind of shaken up from the drive when I got on the plane, because I was really nervous during takeoff. Maybe it was just because I could see how icy the ground was--there was even some ice on the wing I was sitting right over. Also, the crew was very emphatic about how we needed to listen to those dumb safety announcements at the beginning of the flight that I always ignore. I'm usually a very calm flyer, but I was a nervous wreck today. I guess it was all that leftover adrenaline still sitting around.

The rest of today has mostly been spent at work. Somebody stole my chair. Every time I go away, someone steals my chair. Sigh.

In the forum today: Which are scarier: planes or cars?