It’s Thursday at 1:56 PM, and I’m frantically finishing last minute checks on all of the servers before I go on my trip. I’ve got all of the major ones covered, and I’m ready to leave. I start off for Grand Central Terminal, first stopping at the Post Office to mail something. I then make it to GCT shortly before my 2:20 PM train leaves, and get home around 3 PM.

When I arrive home, I try to get things together for me to go, including my laptop and camera stuff. Leon then comes by to say goodbye to me. I remember about getting nasal decongestant so my sinuses don’t act up on the plane, so we run to Walgreens to get some Afrin nasal decongestant. We then say goodbye, and mom and I pick up Eric to drive us to the airport.

We leave Eric’s place around 4:45, just in time for…traffic. There was traffic backed up from 95 onto 87. As a result, it took us way longer then it should have, but we still made it to the airport at 5:30 PM. Our flight was for 6:59 PM. We checked our bags outside, and go inside to go through security. I have no problems, but I needed to remove my sneakers - mom didn’t remove her shoes, and for some reason they didn’t ask her to. I did have to go through the metal detector again, because I left my cell phone in my pocket - oops.

After we get past security, we cut our sandwiches that Eric prepared for us, because he didn’t have a chance to do so. We then used the restrooms, and proceeded to the gate. We sat down in the waiting area at the gate, and waited…and waited…and we noticed that there was no plane outside. Then they announced (at 6:25) that our plane was supposed to land at about 6:40 PM, which meant that we wouldn’t be able to start boarding until the plane was de-boarded (10 mins), and cleaned (20 mins). This meant a earliest boarding time of 7:04 PM. OK, fine.

So at like 7:15 PM, we get on board, near the very back of the plane (row 32 of 34). It’s just starting to lightly rain (they forecasted thunderstorms). We get settled, and…wait some more. Then the rain starts. I mean, really starts. It rains, then it hails, yes hail. We then sat on the tarmac until the rain and hail stopped. We then got in line, with 4 planes in front of us. Total time difference: 1.5 hours. We were scheduled to get in at 9:59 PM. We got there at 11:32 PM.

There was one cool thing about the flight though…Every seat had touch-screen LCDs in front of them, which had Dish Network TV (25 channels), Music from Delta Radio, and various CDs, movies you could rent, games you could rent (as well as a trivia game you played against other passengers for free), and best of all…it was powered by Linux! It was pretty crazy, because I see them turn on, and I’m like, wait a second….It was a Geode processor based system, and ran Linux off of a flash memory card. Pretty neat. I was impressed. :-)

Oh yeah, first thing once we’re on the ground…the humidity hits us hard as we walked out of the airport…Even at 11:50 PM, it was hot and humid. Yuck.