I had a good time in Boston and really learned a lot at the conference. I'll post more on that later.

It's a good thing that I got onto that 8:55 flight on Tuesday morning as a standby, or else I wouldn't have gotten into Boston until midnight Boston time. I was officially booked onto a 1:30 pm flight in case I couldn't fly as a standby, but that ended up getting delayed for some time and once they finally made it onto that plane, it got stranded on the airport tarmac for 3 hours or some crazy amount of time.

I'm generally a patient person when it comes to airplane travel so I was generally okay with the Monday night arrangements. My main problem is my Dramamine paranoia. When flights get delayed, it throws my Dramamine intake into a free-for-all. Dramamine's typically good for about an 8-hour stretch, but when I've been delayed/canceled and I'm already in a Dramamine induced haze, I often forget when to take my next dosage. Then when you add the standby factor of not knowing if you're even going to get on a plane or not, that REALLY throws me off.

Sleeping at DFW was pretty miserable. It was cold as hell. All the lights were on so it was bright as hell. They continue making intercom announcements all night long, so it was noisy as hell. The cots were hard and made noises any time you moved, so it was hard as hell to sleep. And then to top it all off, they have CNN playing all night long on the television monitors, so as if he wasn't already annoying enough, Wolf Blitzer was annoying as hell.

Katie made a comment that I should feel fortunate that this wasn't while we had kids. I couldn't agree more. I felt bad for all of the families that were stranded in the airport. Many of them had been at the airport longer than I had been and many were out of diapers, running low on diapers, all the while dealing with EXHAUSTED kids who were literally in tears at being dragged around the airport for 24 hours.

I'm generally not one to rant and rave to ticket agents about something clearly beyond their control and paygrade, but many people just completely coming unhinged and were ranting and raving to anyone who was around. I don't know if it's DFW airport, American Airlines, or what, but they really need to devise a better system. It just reminded me of a tightly wound ball of string. When one little strand gets severed, the whole ball of string just comes undone. And honestly, the weather was crappy, but I've flown in much worse. But I guess it's better safe than sorry. I'm not faulting them for that.

But it got to be ridiculous. I mean at one point, we had a flight crew but no pilots. Then we finally got the pilots, but because it took so long to get the pilots, the flight crew were going over their hourly limit. And all the while, no one could give anyone a concrete answer. I'd rather be told that a flight in canceled in a proactive fashion than to be led along for hours and hours only to finally have the flight canceled. It was absurd.

My flight left Boston for DFW at around 3:00 yesterday, but then we had to circle Dallas for an hour or so due to a thunderstorm hovering over DFW. Luckily, this thunderstorm delayed my connecting flight so I was fortunate enough to have a flight last night, but sitting in the DFW airport on another delay was the last thing I wanted to do. When I got home, I pretty much crashed where I fell.

It's could to be home. I'll write a week-in-review at some point in the near future.

-Matt