As I type, A. and I are sitting on United Flight 487, which in turn is sitting on the runway at Philadelphia International Airport. Our destination is O’Hare Airport in Chicago, where we had hoped to attend our niece Grace’s christening today. We actually planned to be a little late, but a member of the flight crew just announced that – due to “some weather” – it looks like we will be very late. O’Hare is “ground-stopped,” meaning that nothing is landing and nothing is taking off. Meanwhile, ominously, our flight crew is “running up against the limits of [their] flight day,” meaning that we could conceivably be delayed long enough that they will need to be replaced before we can take off. (Pilots are notorious weaklings who cannot be expected to remain awake for more than a set number of hours each day without napping with their blankies; in the world of ships, you simply stay awake, for as long as it takes, sleep when you’re dead, etc. Guess this is why the Air Force is known to the rest of the military as the Chair Force.)
We are promised an update in an hour and twenty minutes.
We hope everyone who has some hope of our visiting them in the near future will understand our refusal to board a plane for the next several years, by which time the world should be mostly out of oil anyway and there won’t be any more flying at all for non-millionaires.