I’m sitting in a lovely little garden behind a school of oriental medicine.
ariche is taking a final exam. She and royalbananafish and andropostroymet me at the airport. Which was really wonderful as the flight out from LA was an experience.
Well, not the flight itself. The flight got to the gate about 5 minutes after the time it was supposed to board. From there was the 20 minutes while they unloaded it and didn’t exactly clean it. (You can tell, just look in the seat pocket in front of you when you board)
We boarded and after an acceptable wait taxied to the runway. Then we revved up and then revved down. Somewhat normal. Then we waited a bit. The captain got on and said we were taxiing back to the gate. The tower noticed smoke coming out of one of our engines. If we noticed fire trucks as we returned to gate we were supposed to assume that this was normal and not worry. We got to the gate and were asked to deplane.
Then the chaos ensued. One gate with a flight to Portland in 90 minutes started making a list of waiting list passengers (first come first serve). Meanwhile our gate started another list of rebooking. To first come-first serve lists can make a bunch of irate passengers… well even more irate.
The flight was to leave at 5:50 and we deplaned at 6:30. They told us that they would have ‘more information’ for us at 7PM. Typically more information is when the next update will be. At 7pm a suited person emerged and said we’d depart at 7:30. I asked if they’d determined the problem. He said inconclusive. I said, “That’s not exactly comforting.” He then quickly back pedaled and said, “I’m not a technical person, I haven’t been told what the situation is.” No one in a suit (self included) bought that. at 7:30 they let us back on. This was the same plane.
Turns out that the plane’s starter engine got some gas into it so it smoked a bit. The starter engine has two purposes, to blow air into the engine to get it spinning and to run the AC in the cabin before take off. They apologized for the stuffiness in the cabin and explained that the engine would be started with a blower from the airport and we were on route.
Dinner consisted of a chicken breast sandwich with mozzarella. I performed the magickal act and told myself that I would be able to withstand it as there was no alternative. Magickal act was successful.
Got to ariche‘s and gleibinger‘s place. Lots of people were there. It was nice to have such a welcome reception. And port 😉 Also saw: maxomai, yogsothoth (might be yogsothoth93), juliakstone and even rikokujin who I finally got to meet. Oh, wait,… how can I forget.. miss_pig who promptly used me as a pillow.
Long weekend ahead. Will post more later.