Snuck back to Minnesota again to surprise my dad for his birthday. 🎉

The surprise went flawlessly, but the entire journey there was a comedy of errors. Our hubris getting to the airport a little later for each trip finally caught up to us. Highlights: a few extra laps through the parking garage, a security checkpoint in shambles, a hobble through the wrong terminal on a tweaked ankle, and a Shining-level nosebleed right on rotation. But we made it.

Most of my air travel growing up was non-revving, a perk for airline employees and their families where you could ride in otherwise-empty seats for a few bucks. There was a dress code (in case the only seat was in First Class) and you just sort of showed up at the airport at 5 a.m. and lined up at one gate after the other until you lucked out. I imagine this doesn’t work at all anymore, since I don’t think I’ve seen an empty seat on a plane in fifteen years.

Needless to say, my instinct for always wearing slacks and arriving four hours early has completely dissolved. Time to go back? Reject modernity; embrace sitting around at an Auntie Anne’s.

We usually fly United (because Chicago) and they’ve ordered a lot – no, really, a lot – of new planes with the realistically-sized overhead bins^[1] and seatback entertainment with Bluetooth and the whole nine yards. But in the meantime, you get the oldest domestic mainline fleet imaginable. If you’re lucky, you end up on a plane so old that it skipped the early-00s refresh that squished all the seats too close and tore out all the TVs and instead get the dying gasps of 30-year-old leather and all the potato-ified DirecTV you can handle.

Spotify is killing my sweet boy. Was it ever useful? No, not really, but it served nobly in our non-CarPlay-capable car for a few years until I got worried people would think it was a phone and bust a window trying to take it. Now it lives on my desk as a deeply clumsy music remote. Big fan of niche hardware experiments though. Extreme bummer to push a deliberate “turn this into e-waste” software update for a thing that currently does its dumb thing just fine.