Mother and Child Reunion

I woke up this morning and went straight to my desk.  After firing up my trusty, and soon to be replaced, 8 year old computer, I hit favorites and went to a decent flight tracker.  Sure enough, United 257 was in the air, bearing, among others, Carolyn's son in the general direction of central Oregon.

Everyone with a TV and electrical power is aware Mother Nature is totally upset with the way we're running things and She's letting us know who's boss.  Well, at least She's letting us know just who is in charge of the Midwest and Mississippi River Valley.  Since we in this household are blessed with the cursed TV and managed to pay the power bill last month, I am aware of the fury being unleashed in those parts and wanted to be sure Shane was in fact on the way. 

For some strange reason, which I suspect has a lot more to do with economics than of passenger comfort, United wanted to tempt nature, tick off all it's clients, and land it's littleliner in Chicago.  From there, everybody jumped into an Airbus 320 which needed to land in Portland, I guess to consult a map, before arriving here on it's way to somewhere else in a different direction.  You figure it out.  I'm tired.

Next, a quick peek at one of several thousand readily available weather maps got me worried.   There were tornado warnings, huge thunderstorms and generally miserable conditions forecast for Chicago, exactly the place United thought Carolyn's son needed to be. 

Somewhere between my ears came a vision of Shane shaped like a shinny metal ball.  He was trapped inside a pin ball machine, bouncing between posts on a map of the United States, and the flippers were miniature Airbus 320's.  The posts off which Shane was bouncing were labeled with the names of cities, and a nerdy looking guy with huge round glasses, wearing a United Airlines uniform, was operating the flippers and screaming at the top of his lungs, "Too much gas!  TOO much gas!"

Well, you guessed it.  Shane's connecting flight from ORD to PDX was delayed four hours while the weather passed.  Naturally he missed the next flight.  Only through the most intelligent of guile, was he able to secure a seat on a different craft to complete the journey.

Now, any pilot can figure out a better way to get from there to here.  All ya need to do is set the autopilot doohickey on the GPS to a heading of 284 degrees and fly for 1827 nautical miles.  Then you land the plane.  Any weatherman could have first looked at the forecast storms, the above route, and determined the plane would have flown well north of all the mess, no drinks would be spilled, and the time required to complete the trip would have fallen from 10 hours (not counting the delay and missed connection, which added another five hours) to 3 hours and 42 minutes.

Bean counters rule the world, and it's because nobody wants to pay for service.  We settle for crappy performance with our airlines, our hammers and our kids lead-paint coated toys.  We have to.  All the money's gone.

The best part of this whole story is the smile on Carolyn's face when her son walked through the door.  We arrived home from the airport in time for him to watch me try to fire up the BBQ for the first time this year.  Then, he was able to spend some time with his mother while I ran to the store for more propane.  Who the Devil opened the valve while it was in the moving van?   Such mysteries plague my life.

The rib eyes were fantastic, baked potatoes and broccoli rounded out the meal, and the Mother and Child Reunion was the highlight of this year so far.  I love to see her smile.