My oldest son (Simeon, 17) drove us to the airport, saving Microsoft the $35 shared van ride service fees. I left my laptop at work and texted (sent a text message via cell phone) to Adam, asking him to email me the slide decks for the courses I am teaching in Germany. Adam sent out all the materials and I retrieved them on a borrowed laptop in my hotel the night before the classes started. The class room has no network access so I am very grateful to Adam for sending them.
My 11-year-old son Yofiel and I flew USAir from Seattle to Philadelphia. A 3.5 hour delay on the ground because of a broken jet engine kept us in the plane in Philadelphia longer than we would have liked. Luckily we had packed lots of food (carrots, apples, veggie-burgers, egg-beater sandwiches) and a large nalgene full of water. USAir does not feed or offer drinks topassengers, even after they keep them prisoner on a plane for 3.5 hours because of their extreme incompetence. When USAir announced the a 15-minute delay because the jet engine needed repairs we immediately burst into a familiar song:
Wanna be late?
Well ain't that great.
It ain't no crime
You're not on time.
(chorus)
Got time to spare?
Fly USAir!
And we don't care.
We're US Air!
Connecting flight?
That can't be right.
Gonna miss it.
Goodbye kiss it.
(chorus)
etc.
Yofiel and I drew battleship grids on blank paper and fired at each other for a while. I finally won a game against him! Then we spent a few hours watching two movies I had in my phone, sharing the bluetooth headset (one earphone per person). Afterwards, Yofi read about 50 pages of _The_Kite_Rider_ (his summer reading) and I read _The Opposable Mind_ that Austina (a co-worker) gave me. I think the topic is interesting but the writing is bad (tedious, pedantic, repetitious, short-sighted, illogical). Eventually the plane took off and caught a tail wind to make up some of the delay. We were only 6.5 hours in the air instead of the scheduled 8 hours.
My wife Gabriella and two of my three daughters (Adinah, 15; Eitana, 4) have been in Zurich for 4 weeks; they came to the Zurich airport to greet us along with my two nephews (Pino, 5; Livio, 3). My family is visiting Gabriella's family. Adinah took Sunday afternoon off from work to visit the airport and greet us. She is working three jobs at a Zoo here in Switzerland and is having the time of her life. My wife announced to us (in Swiss German) that she would speak exclusively Swiss-German with us in order for us to improve our language skills. Adinah is already speaking Swiss much more fluently than I. I answer back in a mixture of German and Swiss, but everyone understands me. We went shopping in the airport and I babysat the three youngest kids while Gabriella took Yofiel's luggage and groceries to the car. I bought a SwissComm SIM card for 20 Swiss Francs and my cell phone is now working here in Europe; it includes 20 Francs (about 250 minutes) of cellular air time and can be used anywhere in the world (unlike my T-mobile service, for which I must buy a special roaming add-on plan plus $1.50 per minute if I want to use it in Europe, tsk tsk). My brand-spanking new cell phone number is: +41.79.863.2758 (to which you can send text messages). I set up Microsoft Office Communicator to forward office calls to the new cell phone number.
The Zurich airport has grown somewhat with another terminal of gates and more, shorter flights inside Europe. I connected from Zurich to Dusseldorf from where I drove to Aachen. Aachen is about an hour's drive from three different airports and the flight to Dusseldorf connected best from Zurich.
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