Monday, November 22, 2010

Some thoughts from the Cleveland airport

Some thoughts, live from the Cleveland airport as I try to figure out when my flight is leaving... it was supposed to be at 8:30, it's looking closer to 11:30 now.

- I'm glad this airport has free wi-fi.  The Atlanta one only let you go to Atlanta tourism sites, which was kind of annoying.  And I wasn't going to pay for internet.  I feel like for the amount of time you could potentially spend in an airport, they should have free wireless.

- I saw someone calmly walk through one of the new airport scanners in Atlanta, and no one threw a fit or got molested.  Just for the record.

- I grabbed dinner a few minutes ago in a sports bar and watched Ben Roethlisberger shove someone after a play and then get knocked flat by the other guy.  I might be a bad person for laughing at this.  However, he's not exactly been campaigning for ideal citizen lately, so maybe I'm not a totally bad person.  Don't question my sleep deprived logic there please.

- It's weird to be flying home for Thanksgiving.  I think this is the first time my destination is home, versus flying home after flying somewhere else. 

- I have learned today that Cleveland is in the very northern part of Ohio, on lake Erie.  I did not know this.

- I watched a guy in his 30s stand up from a table and his chair launched backwards with the weight of his backpack hung on the back. My generation, we're going to have some serious spinal cord issues in a few decades.

- Continental gets some points for giving us food vouchers to compensate for being stuck in the airport several extra hours.  Granted, it would have been better if they did this earlier before I ate dinner, when there were actual restaurants still open, but I got $11.50 worth of dunkin' donuts for free, so its not all bad.  The grad student in me is perfectly okay with being compensated for my time in donuts.

- In the future, I'm going to educate myself on the kinds of planes available to fly on so I choose something slightly bigger than today's 'bird', as the stewardess said, than 1 seat on the left and 2 on the right.  I should at least be able to pick out something with overhead luggage compartments on both sides.

- I also feel like it would be useful to know where the plane I choose to fly on is coming from.  But then, I suppose no one would choose to fly on a plane coming from Chicago or a bunch of other places, which is my current problem.

- I looked at a airline brochure and it looked like this airport is huge.  Um, it's not.  Everything shut down at 10pm and I think the only reason people are still here is because we are waiting on our late plane and like one other late plane.  Nightflights, apparently not big here.

- I'm going back in forth between listening to bad Mariah Carey Christmas songs on the loudspeaker radio, and getting the theme song from the Drew Carey show, 'Cleveland rocks, Cleveland rock!' lodged and dislodged in my head.

- It's too bad I'm so exhausted from keeping a messed up sleep schedule the past few days, I probably could have gotten a lot of work done :P

Thursday, November 11, 2010

7 Quick Takes

1. I’ve found a church that’s pretty awesome, and one reason is because it has a lot of young adults.  Don’t get me wrong, I love all ages, but it’s important to have friends that are in my stage of life as well.  I’m in a small group that meets once a week, and we have really good discussions.  We also laugh hysterically about a LOT of things, biblical and non, as well as carve pumpkins, snack on chocolate, and pack Operation Christmas child shoeboxes.  This group is a huge blessing in my life J

2. My mom is currently on a mission trip with my home-church to Tennessee to help with the areas that flooded so badly in Nashville.  She’s been on about 10 of these trips to New Orleans.  My mother is awesome!

3. The weather here is really nice.  It’s mild during the day and cold at night, which means that aside from needing lots of covers on my bed, it’s wonderful.  I think I also don’t realize that Thanksgiving is in two weeks because I associate it with much colder weather.

4. I’m going home for Thanksgiving!  If you will be in Maryland the week of thanksgiving, facebook or call me, we should hang out!

5. I still like my classes, but they are coming to that end of the semester crunch time where they take over my life.  I’m really only worried about our project for my global health class, but theres lots of work in others as well.  Less than a month of class left :O

6. I went to trivia sponsored by a student group at Rollins, the Emory Global Health Organization (EGHO), and it was really fun.  One of the groups was named ‘we are not global health’ and another was ‘proc freq all night long’.  Did you know that cholera is in its seventh pandemic?

7. I’m volunteering with Refugee Family Services in their afterschool program, and the kids are a blast.  We tutur, assist the teachers, and play with the kids.  On Monday a group from Georgia Tech came and donated several new soccer balls and goals, which led to utter pandemonium as about 14 different games happened at once on the blacktop- multiple games of soccer, catch, basketball, tag, Frisbee.   It was awesome to watch, and I’m surprised no one got a ball in the face.  Helping kids be happy is the best feeling ever.