On the campaign trail: Swing states and the dirty Souf'

Oh man what a week. I get around.

Kicked off the week with a trip to NC for meetings and my annual review. Good times, I gave em hell. Ladies, if you ever have to have a salary review, do it while you have your period. My inner rage gave me the edge I needed to stick to my guns. I negotiated for every woman! Hear me roar! n shit. Back home weds night, I had to handle missed NSI business Thursday and then out to Ohio (OHIO!), as of 5pm Thursday.

Friday = meetingsmeetingsmeetings. But that's how I roll, and so I got it done. In the good/bad news sweepstakes I got a call Friday afternoon that I didn't have to work at the health fair as planned on Saturday, so I got clearance from my boss to head home Friday night. I wasn't able to get a flight out so I had to cool my heels one last night in Cinci (which sucks as a single traveler. two thumbs down) However, my helpful United air agent told me if I could get to the airport first thing, there looked to be room on a 6:30 am flight which would get me back to Baltimore around noon. I could handle that.

After waiting 2 hours for a pizza man who never came, and not really sleeping because I was hungry, sad and homesick I woke up at 3am to head to la aeropuerto de locale Cincinnati to try to get standby for an earlier flight and thankfully made it, then had a cool little neon experience in Chicago.

I totally stole this picture from this site. It's the amazing picture that was in my head that I couldn't capture with my cameraphone, or my digital camera (which kind of sucks in low light). I was also a little afraid I might get tackled by security if I got caught taking pictures. What with security being at level ORANGE now these days.

O'Hare airport, hallway between terminals B and C

It was actually one of the nicer moments of my trip, going through this hallway. My first flight had landed in O'Hare at 6:30 local time, after having taken off from Ohio at 6:30 local time. That took me a few minutes to process when I first woke up. I had nodded off on the plane so I was groggy and pretty out of it, wandering around O'Hare half asleep looking for something yummy and caffeinated. It was the layover before my final flight home, and I was totally ambling because I had 3 hours to kill. It was like being in the movie Lost in Translation/Times square/Boohbah land. While tripping. It must be said, there is some classic people watching in airports. Damn if I didn't ride the moving sidewalk for 20 minutes under these lights, trying to deal with the fact that I was in an airport at 630 am with no dinner or breakfast in the belly.

The good thing about big airports is they have everything you want, and if you're going to be held captive somewhere it may as well be somewhere that you can get any combination of completely asynchronous foods at pretty much any hour. So I cruised around and had a little travel brekkie of a Starbucks white chocolate mocha and a spinach pizza, did a little shopping at the Wilson's leather store, took a 45 minute walk to stretch 'em out and then made the standby list for the next flight to Baltimore.

Home sweet home, it feels so right.