It's great that I spent 21 of 44 hours in Bend asleep. Yeah, that's just special.
It's a beautiful day both in Oregon and in Chicago today, which is why I'm even happier to be inside the PDX terminal.
Still, the extra-special-fun symptoms I've experienced over the last two days seem to have subsided. I may attempt to eat solid food in a few minutes, which I haven't done since 9am yesterday.
Can I get a do-over, please?
The good news is, I've gotten almost 12 hours of sleep in the last 18.
The bad news is, of course, I'd rather be exploring Bend, not passed out in my hotel room clutching my stomach.
It's not alcohol; I had precisely one beer with dinner and one glass of local wine after. And I went to sleep at my usual time (11pm CT/9pm PT). But when I woke up this morning, I felt a general malaise that became, after a bagel and coffee plus a one-hour walk around town, light-headedness, nausea, and unbelievable fatigue.
I'm now going over in my head everything I've consumed in the last 24 hours and I have a suspect. Still, it doesn't feel like food poisoning exactly, so I'm not entirely sure what's going on.
I feel better now after a 3-hour nap. Making my goal of 25,000 steps seems highly unlikely, but I can still get in another 10k or so before collapsing completely.
Bonus: here's the Mirror Pond, just a few blocks from where I'm staying.
I'm in Bend, Ore., today, doing nothing of value (except blogging and photographing). I'll have a few photos tomorrow or Monday. My goal for the next several hours is to get 25,000 steps in this perfect weather. (I have sunscreen.)
Pilot Patrick Smith wishes Boeing would update the 40-year-old aircraft instead of pushing the 737 into ungainly configurations:
What I think about the 737 is that Boeing took what essentially was a regional jet — the original 737-100 first flew in 1967, and was intended to carry fewer than a hundred passengers — and has pushed, pushed, pushed, pushed, and pushed the thing to the edge of its envelope, through a long series of derivatives, from the -200 through the -900, and now onward to the 737 “MAX.” In other words it has been continuously squeezed into missions it was never really intended for. The plane flies poorly and, for a jet of its size, uses huge amounts of runway and has startlingly high takeoff and landing speeds. Its range allows for cross-country pairings, but transoceanic markets are out of the question.
I was wedged into the cockpit jumpseat of an American Airlines 737-800 not long ago, flying from Los Angeles to Boston. (In years past, coast-to-coast flights were always on widebody DC-10s or L-1011s.) Man if we didn’t need every foot of LAX’s runway 25R, at last getting off the ground at a nearly supersonic 160 knots — thank god we didn’t blow a tire — then slowly step-climbing our way to cruise altitude. What would it have been like in the opposite direction, I wondered — a longer flight, from a shorter runway, in the face of winter headwinds?
The 737’s poorly designed cockpit is incredibly cramped and noisy. The passenger cabin, meanwhile, is skinny and uncomfortable, using a fuselage cross-section unchanged from the Boeing 707, engineered in the 1950s.
I also like the 757s remaining in American's fleet, and I have some problems with the 737s. I'll be on one tomorrow for four hours, with its vertically-misaligned window and cramped seats. Sigh.
Here we go:
It's also a nice day outside, so Parker will probably get two hours of walks in.
Cranky Flier thinks Brussels Airlines has done a remarkable job keeping its passengers moving after its principal hub closed for repairs last week:
Two days after the bombing, Brussels Airlines started to get things running, but only on its short haul network. It deployed its Avro RJ100 aircraft to Antwerp, a mere half hour north of Brussels Airport, to fly within Europe. That may sound ideal, but the airport has a runway less than 5,000 feet long. The Avro can handle that with ease, but it’s not great for much else.
Meanwhile, Liege, which is about 45 minutes southeast of Brussels Airport, picked up a bunch of flights with the A319/A320 fleet. Liege is the cargo hub of Belgium, but it doesn’t usually do much in the way of passenger flights. The airline is offering free shuttle bus service to both airports from Brussels.
The next day, Friday, Brussels Airlines got at least a piece of its long haul network off the ground. With those flights service a fair bit of connecting traffic, Liege wasn’t the best option. Instead, Brussels moved those flights to operate from Lufthansa’s Frankfurt hub as well as from the Swiss hub in Zurich. (Swiss is owned by Lufthansa as well.)
This was a brilliant move. It allowed Lufthansa Group/United/Air Canada travelers to continue to connect on to these African destinations. And for those who were starting or ending in Brussels, Lufthansa-operated flights were added from Frankfurt and Munich to Liege to help feed people into the new network. Brussels Airlines is flying from Antwerp to Zurich as well.
I'm always encouraged to see a business responding effectively after a major event, especially in aviation.
I've been running around all day and only have a couple of minutes to list some things I've read on my phone while running around. All day.
There were a few other things in there, but these were the ones I paid most attention to.
Stuff to read later:
OK, conference call is ending. Time to perambulate the pooch.
I drove to a vendor site today because Google Maps told me it would take 18 minutes. (It took 21.) Then I drove around in expanding circles for almost 45 minutes trying to find a parking space, which I finally did almost a kilometer away.
I really hate finding out after the fact that the slower form of transportation would have been faster.
In between four rehearsals and two performances this week (Monday through Sunday), I'm taking tonight off. So while I have a minute or two between helping new developers understand some old code, I'm jotting down this list of things that looked particularly appealing when they came up on RSS feeds:
OK, the new devs are testing something...and more on that later.