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.