En Route

Composing this in the WordPress app for iPhone. Hope it works. Curiously, AT&T chose today to have an islandwide service outage, so my Twitter posts and tech tests have been limited.

We’re aboard our flight to SFO. I decided to spring for “Economy Plus” so we weren’t sitting at the very back of the plane and to get a modest extra five inches of legroom for our overnight flight. I wasn’t sure if it was worth the extra money, but now that we’re up front and stretching our legs, I think I’m sold. Five inches sounded pretty pathetic, but considering how cramped I usually feel in “steerage” class (and I’m barely 5’4″), this is downright luxurious. It’ll hopefully make it easier to accomplish the unlikely: actual sleep on a flight.

I’m prepared to serve as Jen’s pillow for the next five hours.

I took today off from work, so we didn’t really pack until this morning. I also went into KIPO to prerecord the news segment that will air tomorrow. We wanted the headlines to be as fresh as possible (though we just missed an announcement relating to the Thirty-Meter Telescope!).

I owe Burt Lum and Lillian Tsang big for accommodating two separate prerecording sessions (the other half was recorded a couple of weeks ago) so I could still be part of the show. I suspect it would’ve been easier to have a guest host or just feature Burt solo.

It was tough saying goodbye to the kids (Katie did only a fair job hiding her tears), but they’ve been through this before, and probably look forward to a much more lax household under grandma. And this year, of course, Katie has email and Twitter and will be able to keep in touch, and keep everyone posted on our adventures.

After dinner, we headed to the airport, and got to our gate 30 minutes before boarding. Interesting, the previous flight to LAX wad delayed several hours, so they had some trouble shuffling those passengers and the ones on our flight at the one gate.

I also realized that I had almost booked us on that flight to get an earlier start and to have two and a half hours to make our connecting flight (versus the 50 minute scramble we have ahead of us at SFO). Good thing Jen hates LAX with the fire of a thousand suns. We would’ve been stuck at the airport all night and still missed our connecting in the airport from hell.

In flight movie: Dragonball somethingorother. I’m sure it was snubbed by the Academy. Fortunately, it turns out my geeky wife has “Wall-E” and “Nick and Norah’ Infinite Playlist” on her 160GB iPod. As well as some “LOST” episodes as well.

Also? Noise canceling headphones rule. I was won over during my trip to SXSW, and got Jen a pair today. Sony, under $40, and worth every penny.

And our pilot reports now that we’ll be arriving in SFO early. The gods are smiling upon us today.

Too bad we couldn’t avoid LAX for our return leg. But we’re definitely doing Economy Plus.