Personal

Well, I’ve made it back. I didn’t get a chance to update more during the weekend, and I’m too tired to do a full update now…but it was a good weekend. Saw some friends, met Candice’s family, she met mine, all went well. The flight home was much better than the flight to Ak, which was a great relief — though I don’t think I’ll ever be completely comfortable with flying again. Grrr. Ah, well.

In any case, I’m back, and I’ll babble more about things later on, I’m sure. Hope everyone else had a good Christmas too!

Welp, I made it to Anchorage — although, to be honest, I really didn’t think I would for a while. I had the single worst flight I’ve ever been on on the way up. Most of it went fine, but then about half an hour before we touched down, we hit the worst turbulence I’ve ever gone through, plus multiple air pockets where the airplane would suddenly drop for a couple seconds before it caught lift again. I’ve got to say, that was the most all-out terrified I’ve ever been — one drop I might have made it through with just being a little frightened, but when it kept happening over and over, I really started to freak out. I was completely convinced that we were going down — especially when after it started happening, and when the captain came on the intercom, rather than telling us something about how we’d hit some turbulence and would we please all sit down (which, while it would be stating the obvious, would have been somewhat reassuring), all he said was, “would the flight crew please sit down and buckle in now.” Not encouraging.

However, we did make it through (after feeling the plane drop out from underneath me way too many times), and eventually landed in Anchorage. I’ve never been so happy to get off an airplane in my life. It’s kind of frustrating really — I’ve never been scared of flying before. Now I’m nervous about getting on the plane back to Seattle in a few days. I will — but I’m a lot more antsy about it now than I would have been otherwise. I’m probably not the only one, either, as I heard many of the other passengers commenting that none of them had ever been through something that bad — turbulence, sure, but never fifteen minutes of continued extremely heavy turbulence with four or five air pockets. I never want to have to go through that again.

In any case, once we were down and got off the plane, parents met me outside the gates. We headed down to the baggage claim to pick up my one piece of checked luggage — my umbrella. I’d taken it with me out of habit this morning when I went to work, and since it’s a full-size umbrella with an inch and a half long metal tip, the airlines made me check it in rather than letting me keep it with me as a carryon. Unfortunately, the baggage handlers at Sea-Tac forgot to actually load it on my plane, so it’ll be getting delivered here to my parents’ house sometime tomorrow. I didn’t even have any real luggage and they managed to lose it!

Once we got back to the house it was around 12:30am and parents were pretty beat, so they went right to bed. I called Candice, and the two of us met up at VINL. We stayed there until about 2:30 or so, when we both decided that we had better go home until we passed out right there in the booths. We each headed back to our respective families’ houses…and here I am.

And now that this update is in…bedtime for bonzo. G’night folks!

Woohoo! I was just about to go to bed when I realized that as of today (well…the 16^th), I’ve been living in Seattle for six months! In that six months, I’ve found a solid 40-hour a week job with good possibilities for getting permanently hired on with Xerox at some point in the future; I’ve found a cute little apartment right near the Capitol Hill district; I’m earning enough money to be able to afford a high speed DSL connection to the Internet; and I’ve found myself a really wonderful girlfriend.

I think it’s official — I’ve managed to duck the Hellraiser chains that drag so many people back to Alaska when they try to leave.

Rock on — looks like I’ll be heading home for Christmas! Just got done talking with dad…we don’t have the final details yet, but it looks like I’ll be taking a cab straight from work to the airport on the 21^st, flying out of Seattle at about 7:45pm, be in Anchorage until Christmas day, and fly out of Anchorage to come back about 6:45pm on the 25^th. Can’t stay any longer than that, unfortunately, because of my work schedule, but at least it’ll be better than missing out entirely. So, I’ll actually be back in Anchorage.

Hm.

Village Inn, here I come!

Well, okay, so that’s a lie. It’s not much fun at all. But, it’s rather nice when I make it through a round of paying rent, bills, and balancing my checkbook, and still having $572.53 left in my Washington Mutual accounts. Plus whatever I’ve got in my Ak USA accounts, which I’m not touching except for paying my DSL bill once that starts coming in…I’m actually managing to get to a point where I really think I can survive down here on my own two feet. Pretty darn spiffy.

Last night after I got off work Candice picked me up and we headed out to her college so that I could meet some of her friends and see the college band play. Was a nice evening — I got to put faces to some of the names she’d been telling me about and take a look around the campus, which was neat. One really funny thing — one of the girls going to her school is someone I was in German class with back at Bartlett High School. I don’t think she ever recognised me, though….

So that was about it…home by 10:30 or so, in bed about midnight. Not the most exciting stuff in the world, I suppose, but that’s the way my life goes.