In the air

I wrote this a couple of days ago, more or less. I was surprised yesterday to find out that it was Christmas eve. I mean we left days before Christmas. I tried posting this on the way here, but it was all I could do to get this written. Trying to accomplish anything more using the wretched touchpad was hopeless.

I must be a little groggy. When I tried to logon to my Chromebook I couldn’t find the ‘T’ on the keyboard. First I used the ‘R’ and when that didn’t work I used the ‘F’ key, which didn’t work either. The keys are labled with lower case letters, so that may have contributed to my confusion.  The Chromebook’s response didn’t help much either. It tells me it is ‘unable to verify the password’. Could that be because we are not connected to the internet? Well, let’s see if we can connect. Point and click and point and click once or twice more and it says we’re good. Try logging on again and this time we get it right.

    This can’t be right because how can you work off-line if you have to have a connection in order to log on? OK, you don’t need a connection, you just need to be able to enter your password correctly.

   Flying on commercial airliners must be what I imagine living in Japan is like. Crammed in, cheek by jowl, and everyone trying to put a good face on a wretched situation. The seats are so narrow that the man sitting next to me and I cannot both put our arms down at the same time. One of us has to fold their arms across his chest or rest his forearms on the little fold down tray table. My weighing 265 pounds couldn’t be a contributing factor, could it?

   I am sitting in an exit row. There are only two seats here instead of three, but I’m not sure that it provides any benefit. When I first sat down I realized there was an extra under-seat storage space in front of us, so I slid my backpack in there. I was quickly disabused of this notion when the woman diagonally in back of me told me that was her space and she needed it for her purse. Well, excuse me, Ms. mighty frequent flyer. You wouldn’t need it for your purse if it wasn’t the size of a steamer trunk. Don’t you be talking about my back pack.

    The worst part of exit row seats is that they don’t recline, not that regular seats recline all that much, but when you are riding in a cattle car every little thing has a big impact. I bought a couple of fancy air-travel pillows for this trip because we are going to be stuck in these glorified beer cans for a very long time and I’m willing to gamble that they might let me catch some Z’s. With no reclination, it didn’t work out. By resting my head on a pillow on top of my arms on the table I was able to at least relax for a bit.