High/lowlights of the Trip Home

-- The little (3yo?) German girl who flew on the transatlantic flight with us and kept returning to our seats to gawk at our cat without a smile or a frown, simply bobbing with a blank wondering stare to keep eye-contact with Hobbes as he sniffed the airplane cabin's air through the cracked grating of his pet carrier.
... --Also when I put my head behind his carrier and meowed in a transparent stab at feline mimicry, the little girl shrieked with terrific glee and sent Hobbes into a curl in the darkest corner of the cage.

-- When the people behind us on the plane paid for some beer and then an hour later we got some for free with our mid-day dinner.

-- Listening to the new Fiery Furnaces album over and over again while I napped on the plane.

-- Hobbes didn't make a peep until our landing-in-NYC turbulence sent the contents of his stomach lurching up and out through the front of his cage. Then I cleaned him up in the men's room, but not on the baby changing table, although I did consider it.

-- When we realized we had to lug all of our baggage out through customs and to an entirely distant terminal at JFK, necessitating a re-check and re-security process, which took forever, and after which we high-tailed it to the gate (gate 11), except when we came down the escalator we realized we were in baggage claim, which meant we'd overshot and had to go back through security, with our cat. He was not having fun.

-- A guy in the security line in front of us the first time who turns out goes to ECU and we talked to him about North Carolina. His dad works for the airline and he gets free flights!

-- Wolf Blitzer, on CNN in the gate lobby once we'd reached it, told us a metro had leaped onto the back of another metro in Washington, D.C., basically two hours before we were supposed to land there. Luckily we had someone to pick up us but still damn.

-- I read about 100 pages of The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories by H.P. Lovecraft. The title story is fantastic. I want the plush.

-- Eating a bag and a half of Totino's Pizza Rolls at Megan's sister's for dinner. Then getting drunk and falling asleep.

-- Talking to my mom on a real phone for the first time in nine months.