I'm back home now, in fact I've been back almost a week but have been too knackered or ill to do anything. I miss the Washington weather and Harris Teeter, the 24-hour supermarket that was 5 mins from my apartment. It wasn't cheap ($10 for a tub of cookies, for instance), it had a funny smell that I couldn't put my finger on, it sold only 1 motorbike magazine (but about a dozen gun magazines), but I liked it. It wasn't just the crazy food (everything has to have peanut butter/bacon/cheese), I liked observing the zombies who stalked it's aisles. The mad cat-lady ratio was pretty high, perhaps because the area is made up solely of apartments rather than family homes.
Oh yeah, it snowed. Proper
Scott-of-the-Antartic snow, but it only lasted a day and didn't really settle. This was about 3 days after I'd got sunburnt at Kings Dominion, very weird.
Cubicles. We were horrified when workmen started assembling these, we're used to big open-plan offices. The USA folks had demanded them though, there's a strict hierarchy that they're not prepared to give up; you start in a 4-person cubicle, promotion gets you a single like the one above, from there it's an internal office, then an office with a window, and finally a corner office with dual aspect - like in Mad Men. I'm hardly Mr Sociable but I didn't like it, you could go days without talking to anyone.
Back at Dulles, the
Die Hard 2 airport (I thought it looked familiar when I arrived). Walking to the gate I passed an Air France A380 (the double-decker job), it looked proper-Gerry Anderson futuristic and made me feel like I was living in the future (for about 5 seconds). I had a Upper Class ticket for the ride home, so got to hang out in the Virgin clubhouse for 3 hours. Unfortunately, it wasn't like in the adverts; there were no pop stars (not even rubbish ones like Bono), there were no models, nor any stewardesses with short skirts getting a bit drunk. There was nothing whatsoever to do, apart from read the bloody
Daily Mail. That made me sad.
On the plane it was much better, you get a private little pod with a leccy seat and 3 windows to yourself. You press a button and it flips over into a bed, but I couldn't really sleep, it's just too noisy. Plus, I was close enough to the flightdeck to hear a number of scary whooooop-whoooop noises, the ones normally heard in the final seconds of a cockpit voice recording.
So, back home. I'm annoyed by the drizzly weather, and it's taken me days to get used to the time difference. I dug the Suzuki out today, but didn't feel like I had sufficient wits about me to ride it safely; maybe tomorrow.
