| Tuesday, September 30, 2008 |
15:44 - Keeping the economy flying
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I'm spending the week back home in San Jose, getting some necessary business done here before things in New York get so hectic as to make such things completely impossible.
The flight was good, though it was a three-legger. Lileks mentioned in a recent Diner that he's amused by the safety instructions that admonish parents to secure their own masks before those of their kids, in a bit of federally-mandated selfishness; in a similar vein, I've always found it funny that they always have to tell you that "even though the plastic bag does not inflate, oxygen is flowing," or airline-by-airline-varying words to that effect. It's the one example of lawyerly fine-print in the whole thing, where you always end up wondering inwardly just what caused them to have to add that disclaimer: was there a rash of depressurization incidents in the 70s where an otherwise neat and orderly deployment of oxygen masks turned into a chaotic ruckus because people started panicking when they noticed their plastic bags weren't inflating, even though oxygen was flowing to the masks? Or were they addled by oxygen deficiency stemming from the fact that they were busily securing their kids' masks before their own?
Anyway, I got on an earlier initial flight out than planned, which put me in Philadelphia for over four hours; that gave me time to spend having lunch (or a pantomimed caricature thereof) at Vino Volo:
I'm no wine expert, having only had my first introductions to alcohol in the last three or four months; but I did grow up in the California wine country, so I figure I'd better start somewhere, and an enotheque in an airport mezzanine is as good a place as any, I guess. So a tiny wedge of brie-and-prosciutto-on-focaccia and little-tray-of-truffles later, I now know the intimate particulars of three wine labels and vintages that I'll probably never encounter again. Hmm. Fun and intriguing and great for the ol' self-image, but somehow I think the chocolate tastings were more satisfying.
Speaking of chocolate, the company that supplies the truffles to Vino Volo—Truffle Junkies—has a Connoisseur's Series of truffles made from single-origin chocolates whose sources I recognize instantly. Amedei 9? Check. Domori Porcelana? Check. And Ampamakia, Palmira, and Gran Couva, all from 2005? Why, that would be Valrhona's vintage collection, with which I am intimately acquainted. Hell, they've even got a Sambirano truffle—which, if they're using the super-sour Domori Sambirano, which I strongly suspect they are, since nobody else uses that as a brand or variety name (most just say "Madagascar")—this means I can avoid the pitfalls of trying to do it myself by simply ordering them online. Figures.
Anyway: it was a pleasant flight west, and we landed in Los Angeles amidst thunderheads moving rapidly eastward and clearing, which left puddles of sunlight breaking through the cloud cover and landing smack on downtown LA in one of the rare smog-free days I so cherished while in college:
My connecting flight, naturally, was as far as physically possible from the gate where I landed (as is always the case in flights that shuffle you from one airline to another in the interest of spelunking the basement of bargains)—diagonally across the airport complex, at the extreme opposite end of the extreme opposite terminal. I had to walk right under the big parabolic restaurant tower in the center of LAX, even. And then I had to make my way to where American Eagle stages its regional flights, which is indicated by the innocuous-looking "gate 44L" on your ticket—"L" sub-gates means that "gate 44" is really an escalator to a bus to a separate satellite terminal building with "L" gates in it. But at least it's stylish, with window etchings of glider wind eddy formations and Bernoulli's Theorem:
Sometimes I get unaccountably nostalgic about Caltech.
This route served to get me acclimatized by degrees back into California, though, and by the time we were in the air the sky had cleared and a sunset appeared off the left wing that was too gorgeous for a mere iPhone camera to capture with any fidelity:
Home is so familiar as to seem as though I'd never left. The dog certainly seems to think nothing's changed. Though I have a feeling that though canine familiarity with temporal matters only exists in a hazy radius of a day or two, and he was about exactly as happy to see me as he was on any evening when I came home from work, Banzai didn't really think I was back for real until he woke up the next morning and found I was still there.
Too bad it's only for a week.
Ah well. It's all good. And economic doom notwithstanding, I'm feeling happy about how things are going.
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Brian Tiemann
