Houston travel recap

I left Tuesday afternoon for a committee meeting I was organizing in Houston. On the plane, I sat between two men. On my left was a quiet man who slept the entire flight. What a blessing! On my right, however, was Mr. Friendly who was wearing alligator boots with sharp alligator skin points on the back. I did NOT want to hack off this dude, because God only knows what he's used those points for. I made small talk and politely laughed at his jokes when prompted, all the while looking for an opportunity to open my book and start reading. I finally found an opening! I read one chapter, then Mr. Friendly took my chapter's end (though my book was still open) as an excuse to start chatting it up again. Come on, Dude...what part of "can't you tell that I am much more interested in my book than you" do you NOT understand?! Sigh.

Arriving safely in Houston, I took a cab to my hotel. The poor cab driver didn't know where Tulsa was...Bless his heart, he thought it was in Canada. Oklahoma. Canada...yeah, I can see where he might get confused.

I took the entire committee (22 people) out for an appreciation lunch yesterday. We entered the restaurant and somehow I managed to sit at the head of the table...of 22 men! Halfway through our lunch, some random female passerby tapped me on the shoulder and said, "How did you get to be so lucky? Is it your Birthday?" as she kept walking to her seat. I chuckled to myself. Here I was sitting with 22 geophysicists who were old enough to be my father or grandfather and she managed to perceive me as lucky...I feel sorry for HER. Little did they know that only moments before I had only been thinking about how many OTHER conversations I would rather be having that were NOT geophysically related in the slightest. Note to self: Look up "azmuthal" and "Kirchhoff inversion" when I return to the office.

Lucky for me I caught an earlier flight back to Tulsa yesterday evening. I, of course, received the "let's do a strip search and search your luggage too" treatment at the Houston airport heading home. I wouldn't have expected anything less from them. And inevitably, they didn't find anything, so all it did was waste 25 minutes of my time allowing me to get to the boarding area just as the Southwest announcer called out, "We will now be boarding the C section." Other than Mr. Interested who wanted to know everything about the book I was reading, it was a relatively quiet flight home.