barking dogs and other stories about tiredness

knees knocking... © Raffaella Loro

Aryn and I have found yet another free WiFi spot (thanks to AirCanada's datavalet service) and we're sitting in sunny gate 172 waiting to board our plane to Port of Spain. Our proverbial dogs are barking. The above photo is meant to illustrate this feeling. Aryn told me that my last post was looking at bit web 1.0. I don't think he knows what that means... or how that hurts me. He's wrong anyhow. I'll explain it to him later.

We just met up with our good friend Carina, who graciously came out all the way to the airport to hang out with us. We took the monorail from Terminal 1 to Terminal 3 and talked rather excitedly about all sorts of things, the recent NextGen Pecha Kucha night (perhaps I'll post about it during my vacation), Nuit Blanche, and other things that we three find to be particularly interesting. It was a really fantastic way to spend our layover at the airport. Had Aryn and I been left to our own devices we probably would have found some bench somewhere and dozed off. But that's particularly difficult to do in the Toronto airport. There are hardly any benches, and where there are places to sit, they are individual seats with rigid arms that prevent any sort of lounging. What do people have against weary travelers resting their barking dogs and tired bodies?

Aryn got bumped up to executive class on the flight to Toronto. Some woman and her two kids were going to be separated, and rather than arranging with the Air Canada staff to see if we wanted to switch one of our aisle seats so that they could sit together, the woman (on direction of one of the Air Canada staff) just took the seat. It was originally my seat, but I had switched sides with Aryn on account of my bum left knee. We walked up to our aisle and there was sort of an awkward pause... then this little exchange

The woman looked at Aryn and said, "Oh, is this your seat?"
says Aryn, "Umm, yes."
"Do you mind?" says the woman rather rudely, " because you'll have to sit by my kids."

Anyhow, there was a line building up behind Aryn so he switched to the woman's seat... but his new seat was really crappy. It had no adjustable arms, no tv (not that Aryn cared about that one), and it was behind one of the flight attendant jump seats so he had no leg room at all. Once the seatbelt sign was turned off all hell broke loose. Aryn approached the head steward (or whatever you might call him), let him know the situation. The guy realized he had an unhappy customer on his hands and he found Aryn a new seat at the front of executive class. Suddenly my life had become a Seinfeld episode.

This next flight our aisle seats have disappeared, but I'm going to see if I can work some magic and switch our seats around.