The folks are off at church right now so I’ll take a few minutes to bring the blog up to date.

My travel plans from Pennsylvania to Tennessee were screwed up before I even left the house. I checked in online at the USAir site for my flights. The boarding passes their system printed for me weren’t for the flights I was booked on. In fact, the first flight was a full hour and 15 minutes earlier than what I had booked. I was due to leave at 5:55 and they had put me on the 4:40 flight. Which is fine, if I had more advance notice, but I didn’t, so Sherri and I shifted into scramble mode so we could pack and make it to the airport in time.

The flight didn’t actually leave Philly until around 6:40 because of mechanical problems. Seems they couldn’t get the door to lock in the closed position. So clearly I was going to miss my connecting flight in Charlotte.

Except that the connecting flight was delayed because they couldn’t find a pilot for the plane. I arrived into Charlotte at 8:00. The connection was supposed to leave at 7:35 but was showing as delayed until 9:10 because of operational issues. Seems that Mesa “airline” (or USAirways “Express”) didn’t have a pilot scheduled for our flight so they had to call someone in to fly us from Charlotte to Tri-Cities, and then bring the plane back to Charlotte after dropping us off. The flight finally left about 10pm. Remember this was originally a 7:35 flight.

I left the house at 2pm and arrived at my parents’ place at 11:30. Elapsed time: 9.5 hours. A quick check of Mapquest shows that driving this same route should take about 8.5 hours.

So anyway, yesterday was fun. Had to wrap up some last minute shopping at Lowe’s and Best Buy. I wasn’t looking forward to Christmas Even shopping, but surprisingly neither store was busy at all, and certainly no worse than an ordinary Saturday afternoon. It probably took longer for me to wrap the presents than to drive there, find them, and purchase them.

In the evening my brother and his family came over for Christmas Eve dinner, followed by an exchange of gifts with them. Then I slept for 10½ hours, which is unheard of for me.

This morning the folks are at church, as I mentioned. I’ll wander into the kitchen to find something to eat after I hit Submit on this entry. Then we’ll exchange gifts and I’ll see where the day takes me.