I don’t fly often for anything not job-related, but when I do my home airport is Pittsburgh International. I haven’t been to many (about a half-dozen or so), but for as much grief as I give Pittsburgh as a city their airport is my favorite. Other than the parking, which pretty much covers all of Allegheny County, everything here is pretty convenient and comfortable. The air-side terminal itself (all four concourses) is very wide, there’s a lot of shops and restaurants in which to kill time, and it’s relatively bright and cheery. The rest of Pittsburgh could learn a lesson from this place.

I really need to stop being such a cheap-ass and buy a wireless card for my work PC. It would make working from home be so much more convenient during those short term occasions where a laptop & cordless phone around the house would let me keep working. (That and having free wi-fi on the road.)

I always chuckle at the “courtesy carts” and the old people driving them around. I now have to chuckle harder at the sight of Pittsburgh cops driving their own cart around the terminal…complete with little posts for their red & blue lights. I wonder if they have little shackles on that cart for collaring fugitive terminal passengers.

Reason #1,293,405,345.5 that the Internet is the all knowing, all powerful tool of our generation – my wife can track my flights in the air and often knows when I land at the exact same time I do. Flightaware – not just for tracking Bama boosters.

A handheld GPS device takes the magic out of flying and adds to the wonderment, all in one. On one hand, I know exactly where I am over the wild blue yonder (when I get satellites at all) and lose the novelty of guessing where I am by sight. On the other, I know now I’m traveling at roughly 460mph, covering a mile every 8 seconds, and that the “flying at 33,000 feet” spiel the pilot tells me over the cabin speaker is, in fact, not a load of manure.

Whether it’s being a product of the current generation or not having the need to project an air about myself upon others, I cannot imagine flying coach on a full aircraft in a three piece suit. I see middle aged businessmen all the time traveling in full garb, yanking at ties and scratching through itchy clothes. I recognize that dudes flying on the weekdays may very well have come to the terminal straight from the office, but on Saturday & Sunday mornings? C’mon.

If I was flying out of DC-Reagan today, this terminal would be overflowing. My Charlotte flight is stuffed to the gills, but because of this concourse’s aforementioned girth no one is elbowing the other for space. Where PIT has four gates in the space I’m currently occupying, DCA has 7-8 PLUS a few vendor kiosks in between. I like flying through Reagan for the view, but that has to be the worst terminal I’ve been in.

Now that I have you wondering ( :-p ), I rank my preferences as Pittsburgh, Phoenix, Charlotte, Columbus, St. Louis, Dallas-Fort Worth, and Reagan. I’m curious to see how Sanger-Montego Bay ranks. It’ll probably score high because I’ll be on vacation in the Caribbean. Or it’ll rank low because for all I know, live chickens will be running around the tarmac.

There are a TON of people by my gate. Good thing I’ve earned as good of a zone number as I can w/o flying first class. Now I get overhead space.

Riding a warm streak up here in the mountains.  A balmy 75 degrees yesterday with 73 today, but it’s not expected to last.  Apparently some cold air and moisture is rolling in.  Rain the rest of the week and snow over the weekend.  Winter is my favorite season, but spring and autumn are nice too.  I’m a guy who is comfortable around 0 degrees or so.  If the weather stayed like yesterday eight months a year with four months of show I’d be set for life.  Once the mercury heads north of 80 I start becoming miserable again.

Datacom test today.  Yeah.  Haven’t studied much for it, but I’m assuming the attitude of “ya-know-it-or-ya-don’t” for tests.  I’ve done a lot of the physical stuff we always talk about in class, and most of the topics are common sense stuff.  I’ve been to most all the classes in this stretch and understand what’s being discussed.  I tried to study some yesterday but found myself asking what the point was – I knew the sample test answers.  I’ve been there, I’ve done it, this shouldn’t be an issue.

Time flies.  My oldest boy is five years old next month.  Scary.

Well, there were no NCAAs for WVU this season, so we get to be content with the NITs.  Yes, it’s a step down from what we’ve been used to the past couple of years but to me it’s almost expected.  I know there’s a lot of folks pissed that we’re in the Not Important Tournament instead of the good tournament, but I do think it’s a good thing.  Our fellows have lots of potential, but they’re still young and have to learn how to play consistently.  Playing back-to-back March tournament games under the radar may be a huge blessing in order for them to be ready for a deep run next year.  We wound up pasting Delaware St. (who?) to the wall last night.  Next up – UMass.

Hello…..Newman!

What a pisser it was, although not by anyone else’s fault.  Nothing puts a damper on a perfectly good Saturday like waking up at 4:30 in the morning hunched over in pain.  To be blunt, it was quit hard to pee.  To make this sound less strange to those who may not know, I have a recurring history of kidney stones and awoke to a blockage.  Kind of strange that I hadn’t felt it in my back and along the urinary path until the Last Mile, but whatever.  Then, around 5:45am, a second, more sharper pain flares up in my back.  Great!!!  Now, not only do I have a stone down low that needs to pass, but there’s also one forming up high that still needs to travel.  I finally can’t take it anymore around 6am, and wake up Jen to let her know that I may need to get to the ER for that wonder cure….morphine.

As cruel fate has it, by the time she gets up & dressed and does the same for the kids, the pills I’ve taken kick in and there’s little pain.  Or at least no nearly enough to justify the ER trip.  So now we go to monitoring phase.  Add to this two kids who are awake too early and who will be crabby earlier than usual.

So Saturday is relatively dull, as we lay around dead tired from being up too early.  At least the blocking stone pops out around 7pm.  I’ve had numerous stones in my life, and passing one never gets any easier.

Yesterday we made up for drudgery by taking a trip up to Pittsburgh just to check out some shops not available here.  Not too bad of a day, and it was nice to see some snow falling again.

The pain never has returned, or at least in any crippling form.  The ibuprofen seems to be keeping it down.  But one day soon, the Last Mile will come calling again…

It’s an age-old adage – we’re so busy bustling through our daily world that we often pass right over the little things, and I’ll generally agree.  The representative sample I see on class personifies this – we’re either rushing off to someplace because we’re late, we’re engrossed in sometimes meaningful/sometimes petty conversations with others, we’re chatting on cellphones, we;re plugging our ears with MP3 players, or some other distraction.

I honestly have missed something at least a thousand times before until yesterday, and admittedly wouldn’t have thought much about it if it weren’t for a summer job I had several years ago and enjoyed so much.  My dad had hooked me up with an old friend of his who ran an engineering/survey shop in Charlotte, so I spent a summer (1994?) working as a lackey on a survey crew.  I was the bushwhacker, the landmark spotter, the pole holder (snicker), and general gopher.  I climbed up in trees and down in (not yet working) storm drains & sewers.  I worked in construction sites that had not yet built up because lots hadn’t been sold – they needed marked.

Anyway, as I was coming back from class Wednesday afternoon walking down University Avenue, I noticed an untied shoe so I stopped beside the Puriton House (the corner of University Ave. and that steep road that goes past Admissions & Records).  As I put my foot on the wall to tie I noticed an old, corroded survey mark implanted in the wall.  These are the official markers placed with recorded elevations so that surveyors have a starting point to shoot their measurements.  This little disc means absolutely nothing to 95% of the population, yet it sits there day after day waiting to be used.  And with all the construction going on in Morgantown, no doubt it will get used again soon.  Heck, the new library project finished a few years back wouldn’t have started without someone using it.

I shouldn’t be surprised that with the rise of geocaching, there is an offshoot known as geomarking – the finding and logging of these markers by average Joe Smith.  I’ve never cached or marked before, but I guess it basically is a natural version of scavenger hunting. Maybe one day I’ll take it up as a slow-me-down hobby, and perhaps it’ll take me to dangerous places.  Most people don’t know that markers are often placed on bridge abutments – located outside the guard rail and over top of another likely busy highway.