On the Fly: EWR-DTW-NRT-MNL

2008-12-30.

Typed out in Notes on my iPod Touch through the course of the trip, formatted later with photos.

Dec 26, 6:30am EST

En route to Newark. Total travel time will be something like 30 hours, with three connections, the longest leg of the trip being Detroit to Tokyo: 16 hours and 30 minutes.

As we will not have window seats all the way, I have purchased seasons 1 and 2 of 30 Rock and synced as many episodes as possible to my iPod for entertainment. Thank you, Tina Fey.

Dec 26, 10:14am EST

Airbus A319, Newark to Detroit. Flight delayed an hour and a half due to bad weather in Detroit. Unless the connecting flight is delayed, we may miss our connection.

Dec 26, 10:45 am EST

Seated, row 14, gave Amy the window. She’s enjoying watching other people’s bags go up the luggage ramp.

Dec 26, 11:00am EST

Finally in the air, over the scenic New Jersey Meadowlands, with its lovely expanses of ice and brown grass. Then, hills and rivers and patchy fields of snow.

Dec 26, 11:45am EST

Halfway to Detroit, Amy and I listening to Weezer on her iPod through a splitter. The guy in the aisle seat has a Zune. A *Zune*. This is only the second time I’ve seen one in the wild.

Dec 26, 1:30pm EST

We landed in Detroit and were greeted on entering the terminal with a set of broken flight information screens, blank or buzzing with static. Another set of screens down the halls were working, however, and they confirmed our worst fear: we had missed NW 11, our connecting flight to Tokyo. The next flight out, NW 25, would be boarding in minutes.

I had gotten on the phone as soon as we had touched the ground, and was on hold with the Northwest International Reservations hotline as we took the airport tram, in case ground staff were unhelpful. It turned out to be unnecessary; gate agents for NW 25 were quickly able to assign us seats even as the final call for boarding was being made,, despite the flight being grossly oversold. The seats were in-between ones in different rows, but a quick trade with a kindly old Japanese lady got us together by a window.

My reservations call on hold turned into a query about the transfer of our bags to the new flight, and after an eight minute wait the NWA rep assured me that our bags would be loaded onto the new flight. We shall see how that bears out.

NW 25 took off with blessed punctuality despite the snow and ice plaguing the area. As an added bonus, it turns out the flight will be only 12 hours long rather than the 16 I had expected.

Dec 27, 1:00pm JST

Sometime around the halfway point time started going faster, with some help from 1st season episodes of 30 Rock and a few inflight movies: Miss Pettigrew Lives For a Day, Bottle Shock, and WALL-E.

Amy has been enjoying the iPod Touch I gave her for Christmas, with a few free gaming apps to help pass the time. Out the window, a lovely Arctic landscape passes below, ice and tundra lit by the amber light of a sunset that never fades to night. I experimented a bit with a few time lapse videos of the sun and ice, but they came out a bit bumpy.

Dec 27, 2:53pm JST

Some fratboy type guy in an aisle seat keeps standing up in front if the screen to get stuff in his carryon and talk to his mates, casually blocking other passengers from watching WALL-E. The funny thing is, he fancies it rather stylish to wear his neck pilow while swaggering about the cabin, so he has a comical green yoke acting like some kind of over-swollen popped collar. It’s even funnier in silhouette against the screen.

Just a couple more hours to landing. “Breakfast” is about to be served. Outside, the sun is out again, and icebergs dot the sea below.

Dec 27, 9:00pm PHT

We had a good view of Mt. Fuji and the sunset while in a holding pattern on approach to Narita.

Transfer at Narita was painless, the security quick and the airport easy to navigate, even through the surreal daze following a long flight.

Now we are halfway between Narita and Manila, on a noisy, crowded plane with much more loud talking and baby screaming and snoring than any other leg of this trip. Dinner was fish of some sort. Really not looking forward to the arrival process at MNL.

Dec 27, 11:45pm PHT

MNL arrival was surprisingly painless. And our bags made it through! Just waiting for Mom to pick us up now.

Dec 28, 1:30am PHT

This is a really nice hotel room. Sleep time.

NJ Christmas 2008

2008-12-25.

“For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, who is Christ the Lord.”

Merry Christmas, and blessings in Christ to all! We are currently visiting Amy’s family in New Jersey, where a thin layer of snow and ice gives me the first real snowy Christmas I’ve ever had, and a big fat Christmas tree fills up a good part of the living room. Last night we dined on baked ziti, antipasto, and chicken marsala at Amy’s uncle’s house, and today Amy’s mom is preparing a rib roast for tonight. I’m enjoying a very New Jersey Christmas — and that’s not a bad thing.

So far I have been gifted with an iPod Touch (2G) from my parents (an early gift which I can now use without early-opening guilt), the last two Futurama movies from Amy, an iTunes gift card from my brother-in-law, a huge load of pants, shirts, and sweaters from my parents-in-law, a little 3D cat puzzle and picture frame from Amy’s aunt and uncle, and a bit of cash from her grandma.

First thing tomorrow we hop on a plane out of Newark to the Philippines, where we will spend the next two weeks, with a few days in Tokyo on the way back.

Work and home and Amy’s recent pedestrian accident and life in general have kept me too busy and stressed to work much on this site, and I don’t expect much internet access while we’re off on vacation, so things on HNBP will be in stasis for a little while longer. Comments will be off and updates will be sparse, but my various other forms of internet presence — Twitter, Flickr, etc. — will be updated when possible. But otherwise, vacation.

A Merry Christmas again! Here is a chocolate snowman:

More photos here.

CSC LEF Second Life Mention

2008-12-18.

On CSC’s Leading Edge Forum, some of my comments about Second Life appear to have been included in a presentation on their Second Life work for NASA JPL. (PDF with notes here.) I (well, my avatar) attended the Mars Phoenix Landing Event there and found it thoroughly enjoyable, so I’m glad someone at CSC appreciated my appreciation.

The presentation even throws in a photo of me (my real life self, that is) with Pickles (my neighbor’s parakeet whom I occasionally petsit) on my shoulder. Cute, and a sign that whoever put this together knew to search for more of my material to add a more personal touch.

Santa Puts Me Back in the News

2008-12-15.

Who’d have thought writing about getting yelled at by the National Santa’s elves would land me back in the local news? This time, my WeLoveDC entry complaining about being stopped from photographing Santa’s Workshop at the National Christmas Tree got picked up in NBC Washington’s Around Town section.

(Cue, of course, the requisite “WELL PEOPLE WHO TAKE PHOTOS WHICH HAPPEN TO HAVE CHILDREN IN THEM ARE CREEPY TERRORIST PERVERTS” commenters. I don’t ask to get pulled into these rights arguments; I just want to snap a nice amateur photo without being harassed by security-theater-obsessed bullies.)

Christmas Trees of Washington, DC: A Panoramic Sampler

2008-12-15.

We went out on a Washington Christmas Tree Walk on Saturday afternoon, visiting various public Christmas trees around the touristy parts of DC, where I made good use of Stitch Assist to make some panoramas. Amy guest-stars in some of these.

Capitol

This year’s Capitol Christmas Tree is a tall, thin subalpine fir from Montana, decorated with crafts from just about every 4-H club in the state.

Botanic Garden

The USBG’s Christmas Tree is part of a larger “Wonderland” exhibit, featuring fantastical scenes and replicas of DC landmarks made from plant materials, with detailed model train sets crisscrossing the miniature landscapes.

Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian

I was surprised that the NMAI even had a Christmas tree, since that might be a sensitive topic, but there it was, a somewhat sparse fir tucked into an outside corner behind a pillar, decorated with native American crafts.

Smithsonian Castle

Not sure what kind of tree that is, but wow, it’s wide, nicely lit with LEDs and decorated with silvery pine cones and glitter-frosted glass balls. We couldn’t stay long, though, as the Castle was being set up for a reception of some sort.

Smithsonian National Museum of American History

Hey look, they set up a tree in the central hall! It’s, well, a tree. With Christmas tree balls and white frosted sticky-outy-twig things. It hadn’t been lit yet, though.

The National Christmas Tree

I hadn’t expected that the National Tree (on the Ellipse behind the White House) would have so much stuff around it — a smaller tree for each state and territory, a stage for performances, an open fire pit, and a cute little Santa’s Workshop (where I got yelled at for taking photos). The DC-themed tree had been decorated by Children of the American Revolution.

Norwegian Christmas at Union Station

And finally, the Union Station tree, decorated with flags as part of their annual “Norwegian Christmas” program, which also features model trains winding their way through a miniature Norwegian landscape in the West Hall.

Full photoset from Saturday’s Christmas Tree walkabout here.

Caturday!

2008-12-13.

Pandora really likes lying down on my jeans. I couldn’t stand up while she was luxuriating on my thigh.

Update: Now she is sitting on my gray sweat pants, which fell out of the laundry basket onto the floor. She looks very much like the cloud of steam that rises from a lava flow when it reaches the ocean.

Capitol Visitor Center

2008-12-08.

The new Capitol Visitor Center began construction shortly after I arrived in DC, so the whole time I have lived here the whole East side of the Capitol has been hidden behind unsightly construction walls. The project had initially been slated to be done for the 2005 inauguration (that turned out well, didn’t it?) but went so late and over-budget that I seriously wondered if they’d even make the 2009 ceremonies. I’ve always been something of an “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” mindset about the whole thing: why spend money on a hole in the ground for tourist lines when just going in and out through the doors on the upper terrace has served for 200 years?

Against my expectations, the Visitor Center finally opened last week, and it’s lovely. The space is much prettier and roomier than the concrete bunker I thought it would be: rather, we found ourselves in “Emancipation Hall,” a grand plaza of marble and granite with glass skylights viewing the dome, accessible via a finely landscaped approach of grassy terraces. There’s an exhibit hall with the history of the Capitol and its resident legislature, a cafeteria-style restaurant serving various cooked and prepared meals, two gift shops, two theaters, ample restrooms, staging areas for tourists about to tour the Capitol itself, and even a winding underground tunnel leading to the Library of Congress. More photos:

Full Capitol Visitor Center photoset here. A nice place, possibly even worth the time and expense it took to make it, and the restored East Capitol plaza and drive is also good to have back open.

Snake-urday!

2008-12-06.

Am I doing it right?

(I didn’t have a cat photo to show today but I do have this snake we saw basking atop a tree stump in the sun by the boardwalk during our last Roosevelt Island hike. Isn’t it a cute snake?)

In Pictures: The Week So Far

2008-12-05.

It has been trying and will be for a while longer. But she makes it all worth it.

Thanksgiving Weekend 2008

2008-12-02.

We spent Thanksgiving up in the Albany, NY area with Amy’s uncle. For some reason I was a lot more snap-happy on the road than at the house itself. Some oddities from the trip, including a Mayflower on wheels, a wooden bear “holding” a trout, a real dead bear on top of someone’s truck, a head mug from 1973, and a fortune cookie typo:

Full Thanksgiving weekend photoset here. I also got a time lapse of the trip on I-87 going back down to NJ, and some fuzzy video of the world’s tallest water sphere.

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