Whattaday (Free Trader Beowulf & Oahu)
Apr. 12th, 2024 02:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shannon_aFREE TRADER BEOWULF. My first history book in a decade (where does the time go!?) came out today. This is Free Trader Beowulf: A System History of Traveller. It's 296 pages (110,000 words) detailing the history of that singular game system across four and a half decades. It was a joy to write, and I think it's my best book to date. Mongoose Publishing has the product page for the PDF and/or preorder of the hardcover: https://www.mongoosepublishing.com/products/this-is-free-trader-beowulf. My original Designers & Dragons hardcover through Mongoose is pretty rare now, so don't miss out on this one!
I was sitting at the airport this morning, waiting for our plane which had already been delayed more than hour, trying to finalize my Designers & Dragons article on the release of This is Free Trader Beowulf, when I idly flipped to Lihue's departures page and saw *)(@#$@ that our flight had been cancelled. We were off to the races.
THE STORM BEFORE NO CALM. Last night we had a heck of a storm. It was just pouring, for hours. The poor orangies spent much of the evening hiding under the couches. Our mud room had an influx of water, which happened one other time during a really bad storm. (I think it has to do with the dryer vent, but I'm not sure as it's been pretty mysterious both times.) There was thunder and lightning! (Very, very frightening said the orangies.) I eventually buttoned up the house as tight as possible before bed. Wow. When I got up in the morning I almost felt like a disaster survivor, stumbling around in the curious calm.
BUT THE STORM EFFECTS REMAINED. We're going out to Oahu for just a day so that Kimberly can see a BTS-related movie that was just showing twice, once a few days ago and once tomorrow. I could see how fierce the storm had been as I drove into the airport. At one of the major crossroads, there was mud all over the road and a bit of flowing water; the "flooding" signs told the story of how it had all been underwater at some point in the night. Did I mention we apparently got a foot of rain over night? Yow!
THE TSA SOUP NAZI. During what would be our first fight through TSA, they were tremendously understaffed, with just a single person checking IDs and boarding passes. She seemed to be the TSA Soup Nazi. She was constantly yelling at people to move up to certain places as she tried to coordinate the Pre-TSA, disabled, and plebeian lines. And she wasted SO much time doing so, as she argued with just about everyone about getting to the precise right places so she didn't have to wait 1 second for them to step up when it was their turn.
She also was discriminating against the disabled people, which was particularly obvious to us because Kimberly currently uses a wheelchair at airports (though hopefully she's now on a path to improvement for her knee after a good meeting with a physiatrist on Wednesday). But the TSA Soup Nazi would pick several people from each of the pre-TSA and plebeian lanes before she took someone from the disabled entrance. I'd never seen anything like it.
Real LEO agencies sometimes try to test out people who should *NOT* be in law-enforcement/authority positions. Apparently, the TSA needs some work there, because Soup Nazi was a Bad Cop stereotype.
BLOOD, BLOOD EVERYWHERE. At the airport, the departures board was a sea of red. Every single flight was delayed by an hour or more. Yes, including ours. (I'd checked that our plane was on time before we left the house. Hawaiian helpfully emailed me about the delay sometime after we'd already fought through TSA.)
I skimmed through the other flights and discovered one incoming flight had been cancelled. It was about 15 or 20 minutes before our departure, so I was pretty suspicious about that because Hawaiian turns their airplanes right around for their interisland flights. But Hawaiian said ours was just delayed, so I just kept a careful eye on things ... and then sure enough our flight was cancelled as well.
GETTING BACK ON TRACK. We were nowhere near the gate, so I knew we weren't going to get any help from what's one typically overloaded gate agent. I also felt pretty good about being able to get through TSA through the combination of us currently being on the disabled list and having pre-TSA, so back out to the main desks we went. Where we found a line 100 people long or so. Sigh. So Kimberly and I got into line, and I started keeping a hold of her wheelchair with one hand and calling up Hawaiian with the other. We only had moved several feet by the time I got an agent on the phone.
The online agent was able to get us a flight at 2.30, which was about 3 hours after our original flight, about 2 hours after our delayed flight, which was good enough. Thankfully Kimberly's movie is tomorrow not today. So, just an annoyance
We decided we'd better get lunch, since Oahu was receding further and further into the afternoon. So instead of a tasty Oahu lunch we had McDonalds. Ah well.
BACK INTO THE HURLY BURLY. Somehow our new tickets got printed without Kimberly's wheelchair this time, so when we got back to the airport, we had to wait in the ticket line, only a dozen or so people long this time. Then it was back into security. Fortunately, Soup Nazi TSA seemed to be gone and their staffing had improved, so back into the airport it was.
Ah, security checks twice in a day. haven't done that since last time I reentered the United States from Europe.
NO MASK? NO MASK! Astoundingly, planes seem to be back to no-mask classic. Besides Kimberly and myself there seemed to be just one other person wearing a mask on the whole plane. Seriously? Costco has more mask wearing! (But Costco also likely has more residents and fewer tourists than the average interisland plane.)
BACK ON OAHU AGAIN. And we're back on Oahu again, safely ensconced in our room before we go out to eat some dim sum, pay the sunscreen tax (because you can't take sunscreen back and forth between the islands unless you check-in luggage) and otherwise enjoy our evening out.
I was sitting at the airport this morning, waiting for our plane which had already been delayed more than hour, trying to finalize my Designers & Dragons article on the release of This is Free Trader Beowulf, when I idly flipped to Lihue's departures page and saw *)(@#$@ that our flight had been cancelled. We were off to the races.
THE STORM BEFORE NO CALM. Last night we had a heck of a storm. It was just pouring, for hours. The poor orangies spent much of the evening hiding under the couches. Our mud room had an influx of water, which happened one other time during a really bad storm. (I think it has to do with the dryer vent, but I'm not sure as it's been pretty mysterious both times.) There was thunder and lightning! (Very, very frightening said the orangies.) I eventually buttoned up the house as tight as possible before bed. Wow. When I got up in the morning I almost felt like a disaster survivor, stumbling around in the curious calm.
BUT THE STORM EFFECTS REMAINED. We're going out to Oahu for just a day so that Kimberly can see a BTS-related movie that was just showing twice, once a few days ago and once tomorrow. I could see how fierce the storm had been as I drove into the airport. At one of the major crossroads, there was mud all over the road and a bit of flowing water; the "flooding" signs told the story of how it had all been underwater at some point in the night. Did I mention we apparently got a foot of rain over night? Yow!
THE TSA SOUP NAZI. During what would be our first fight through TSA, they were tremendously understaffed, with just a single person checking IDs and boarding passes. She seemed to be the TSA Soup Nazi. She was constantly yelling at people to move up to certain places as she tried to coordinate the Pre-TSA, disabled, and plebeian lines. And she wasted SO much time doing so, as she argued with just about everyone about getting to the precise right places so she didn't have to wait 1 second for them to step up when it was their turn.
She also was discriminating against the disabled people, which was particularly obvious to us because Kimberly currently uses a wheelchair at airports (though hopefully she's now on a path to improvement for her knee after a good meeting with a physiatrist on Wednesday). But the TSA Soup Nazi would pick several people from each of the pre-TSA and plebeian lanes before she took someone from the disabled entrance. I'd never seen anything like it.
Real LEO agencies sometimes try to test out people who should *NOT* be in law-enforcement/authority positions. Apparently, the TSA needs some work there, because Soup Nazi was a Bad Cop stereotype.
BLOOD, BLOOD EVERYWHERE. At the airport, the departures board was a sea of red. Every single flight was delayed by an hour or more. Yes, including ours. (I'd checked that our plane was on time before we left the house. Hawaiian helpfully emailed me about the delay sometime after we'd already fought through TSA.)
I skimmed through the other flights and discovered one incoming flight had been cancelled. It was about 15 or 20 minutes before our departure, so I was pretty suspicious about that because Hawaiian turns their airplanes right around for their interisland flights. But Hawaiian said ours was just delayed, so I just kept a careful eye on things ... and then sure enough our flight was cancelled as well.
GETTING BACK ON TRACK. We were nowhere near the gate, so I knew we weren't going to get any help from what's one typically overloaded gate agent. I also felt pretty good about being able to get through TSA through the combination of us currently being on the disabled list and having pre-TSA, so back out to the main desks we went. Where we found a line 100 people long or so. Sigh. So Kimberly and I got into line, and I started keeping a hold of her wheelchair with one hand and calling up Hawaiian with the other. We only had moved several feet by the time I got an agent on the phone.
The online agent was able to get us a flight at 2.30, which was about 3 hours after our original flight, about 2 hours after our delayed flight, which was good enough. Thankfully Kimberly's movie is tomorrow not today. So, just an annoyance
We decided we'd better get lunch, since Oahu was receding further and further into the afternoon. So instead of a tasty Oahu lunch we had McDonalds. Ah well.
BACK INTO THE HURLY BURLY. Somehow our new tickets got printed without Kimberly's wheelchair this time, so when we got back to the airport, we had to wait in the ticket line, only a dozen or so people long this time. Then it was back into security. Fortunately, Soup Nazi TSA seemed to be gone and their staffing had improved, so back into the airport it was.
Ah, security checks twice in a day. haven't done that since last time I reentered the United States from Europe.
NO MASK? NO MASK! Astoundingly, planes seem to be back to no-mask classic. Besides Kimberly and myself there seemed to be just one other person wearing a mask on the whole plane. Seriously? Costco has more mask wearing! (But Costco also likely has more residents and fewer tourists than the average interisland plane.)
BACK ON OAHU AGAIN. And we're back on Oahu again, safely ensconced in our room before we go out to eat some dim sum, pay the sunscreen tax (because you can't take sunscreen back and forth between the islands unless you check-in luggage) and otherwise enjoy our evening out.