A nine-hour time zone change in one direction, followed two days later by a three-hour change back the other direction.

One apparently lost, and then merely destroyed suitcase. One two-and-a-half-hour airport delay.

Two days, fourteen interviews. Nine more tomorrow.

Ass? Kicked, thanks.

We left the flat this morning at 9, headed into the various queues that make up pretty much the entirety of the CDG experience. The taxi was fine, the airport was fine, the boarding was fine. And the first flight was fine: 10 hours, CDG to IAH, during which I ate some and read some and dozed some and generally pouted a lot.

The flight, it turns out, was our pilot’s last; upon his arrival at IAH, he was officially retired, after 29 years of flying for Continental (and some unspecified number of years in the USAF before that). It was really quite sweet — there were “a salute to your pilot!” flyers on each seat as we boarded, detailing his career, the flight service manager made an announcement early on congratulating the pilot on beginning his last flight (producing round of applause number one), and the pilot himself, as we began our descent, in addition to the usual weather and time of arrival announcements, thanked the Continental customers, the crew and the rest of his colleagues, and his family, several members of whom were on the flight (prompting round of applause number two). Just before touchdown, the flight service manager fired up the P.A. again to say, “okay, folks, here comes the captain’s final landing as the pilot of a commercial airliner,” which was followed by the absolute gentlest touch-down I think I’ve experienced (followed by round of applause number three). And then there was the end: it’s apparently an IAH tradition that, when a pilot retires, the plane is flanked and hosed down by two Houston firetrucks as it pulls into the gate. This, of course, produced the last round of applause, which rolled gradually down the length of the plane. It was pretty cool, and quite dramatic, and I did my best to squelch my kneejerk SoCal “my god, the water!” response.

We’ve got three more hours to kill in IAH, alas, and by the time we get to ONT, it’ll be after eight in the morning in Paris, almost a full 24 hours since heading out. The worst of it, though, is that just now, sitting here, I got the “TripNotes” email from Continental about the flight that I’m taking on Friday, the very thought of which just makes me want to curl up in a small ball and exercise every ounce of my earthly rights as a being protected by the law of gravity.

Yesterday was the summer solstice, of course, the longest day of the year, which hereabouts began with the first bits of sun, sometime around 5.15 am, and ended with the last bits, well after 10.30 pm. Last night was also the Fête de la Musique, with live musical events of all genres taking place in squares and on streets throughout the city, stretching into the small hours. R. and I found ourselves at a café on the Boulevard Montmartre, watching a couple of bands playing on the back of a truck parked right in front.

I quite liked the first band, a very young jazz/funk combo that went by the unfortunate name of Funky Chicken. The second group wasn’t bad, but they were a little too hard-core for my tastes. Which is the point at which I realize that I’m old: I have no idea how to characterize the band’s genre. There was clearly an inheritance from punk, though without the speed, and the bass line had a bit of a funk edge to it. But there was something a bit drony about the guitar part that had me thinking trance, except not electronic, and then there was something screamy about the vocals, that brought me around to hard-core. Which is where I realized I was totally making it up, and had no idea what I was talking about. Whatever: they were pretty good, especially the vocalist, but I enjoyed the first band a good bit better.

In any event, it was a fabulous evening. These short nights aren’t helping with my ongoing sleep issues, but the city is helping everyone recover a bit from their fêtes by being quite grey and cloudy today. It may be the second-longest day of the year, but somebody’s thoughtfully turned down the lights a bit.

In no particular order:

– My sleep problems continue unabated. Last night, I slept fairly well from shortly after midnight until sometime around 4 am, and then was awake between 4 and 8 am (and actually out of bed and reading between 5 and 7 am), and then asleep again between 8 am and 9.45ish. I’m positively exhausted, and yet I know that come midnight tonight, I’m going to be all keyed up again.

– Aside from waiting on a few pieces of information from this year’s crop of graduating seniors, I’ve finished my program’s annual report. This means that all of the tasks that remained between me and my own work are essentially cleared out of the way.

– I’m doing some reading toward the new project today, and it’s in an area that I’ve spent a fair bit of time avoiding thus far in my career, not least because I found the material so difficult. I now find it utterly fascinating, but that hasn’t alleviated the difficulty. (Nor has my insomnia helped, for that matter.)

Further thoughts as the brain cells necessary to produce them regenerate.

The last three days have been utterly consumed with departure-for-Paris business. We head off tomorrow morning, and there are at least three things I need to do before I go. The most pressing of those is sleep, which I’m off to do now. More from the road, as there always is.

So why am I attending meetings and writing reports?

The good news is that I’ve got approximately three more days during which to do any college-related business; then we’re off to Paris for seven blissful weeks. The two of us, the computers, a select number of books, and the summer projects I’ve been dying to get to — and thousands of miles and many timezones between me and the administrative tasks that have been keeping me from it.

I always hate the first part of the summer, because it goes by painfully quickly and is always far more consumed by recovery and reports than I want it to be. But I’m working on reminding myself that far and away the bulk of the summer is still ahead, and that the next two months promise both relaxation and productivity to spare.

We’ve made it back to Claremont, a little less than a week after I set off for Louisiana. The trip was a whirlwind: I arrived there Monday night, R.’s movers showed up Tuesday morning, we finished last details there (and I spent some time with my mother) on Wednesday, and headed westward on Thursday morning. Three and a half days later, we rolled back into town and directly to our favorite taco place for lunch.

The drive went fairly well, and included a couple of spur-of-the-moment changes of course: day 1 took us from Baton Rouge to Oklahoma City, day 2 from OKC to Albuquerque, NM, day 3 from Albuquerque to Las Vegas, and day 4 the rest of the way home. Hotels were good, as were meals. Traffic wasn’t bad, except at the overly plentiful highway construction sites. Weather was fine. The only thing that was really not pleasant was the price of gas, and even that wasn’t that big a surprise.

What was odd—what’s always odd to me, about that drive—is the sense of spending so long out in the middle of nowhere, until suddenly, with no real notice, we were home. It’s disorienting, in a strange way, precisely because it’s actually orienting; “home” suddenly becomes radically situated, embedded in the geography that it’s otherwise so easy to forget. To some extent that’s a result of the peculiar location of this place—one minute, we’re screaming through the uninhabitable desert; the next, we’re eating tacos in a very familiar spot, from which all memory of the desert has been erased—but to some extent I think it highlights the odd boundaries that our usual modes of travel allow us to draw around places, the parts of their context that we get to ignore.

The best moment, in any case, was walking into the condo: some pals of mine had broken in while I was gone, hanging a banner reading “Welcome Home, R.!” and leaving a lovely bottle of champagne beneath it. A wonderful homecoming, indeed.

In Houston, on my way to North Carolina for HASTAC.  If you’re there, look me up.  And with any luck, there might be actual posting from the scene.

There’s been a lot of talk about the need for an Air Traveler’s Bill of Rights of late, particularly since February’s JetBlue fiasco.  I’m all for pressuring the airlines to be more proactive in its approach to customer service, as goodness knows I’ve experienced my fair share of delays and aggravations.

More than anything, though, I think that the airlines need to focus on treating all passengers like they treat their elite frequent flyers.  Here’s the kind of thing I’m talking about:  I flew yesterday to New York, but got delayed in Houston.  Not for a long time—we were about an hour and a half late departing, first because of an air traffic control delay, and then because of a mechanical issue.  Continental delayed boarding until we were actually ready to go, so we weren’t trapped on the plane all that time.  It just wasn’t that big a deal.

However, this morning, I got this email message:

Dear Ms. Kathleen Fitzpatrick:

You are a valued Platinum Elite member of our OnePass program and we strive to meet your travel needs at all times. When we don’t succeed we take it very seriously. Our records show that you experienced an inconvenience while traveling with us between Houston/ George Bush, TX (IAH) and New York/ LaGuardia, NY (LGA) on 03/23/2007.

We work hard every day to ensure that all Continental Airlines flights operate safely and on time. There are times when even our best efforts cannot prevent a flight disruption. We are sorry if this experience was inconvenient for you.

So as a goodwill gesture, 500 OnePass bonus miles have been deposited into your account. Continental Airlines employees are committed to providing you an excellent and safe travel experience. We appreciate your business and look forward to serving you in the future.

The miles, while a nice touch, are more gestural than anything.  What actually meant something to me was the apology—and even more than that, that the apology appeared without my demanding it.  I hadn’t complained, and didn’t intend to.  So what’s amazing here is that the airline noticed that I might have been inconvenienced, and acknowledged their responsibility.

Granted, there are many more passengers than there are Platinum Elite frequent flyers.  But how hard would it be for the airlines to issue such an apology to every passenger so inconvenienced?

Two of my favorite things in the world: spring break and Hawaii. Neither has quite panned out, this go-round.

Earlier this semester, during the height of the negotiation-related stress, I made the decision to cash in a bunch of miles and surprise R. with a trip to Hawaii during my spring break. The timing seemed good; Hawaii is where this blog was born, and it’s returned there fairly frequently over the last several years. It’s a good place for decompressing, and a good place for the odd productivity of the working vacation. Plus, this time out, we had a lot to celebrate. We had high hopes.

And then R. arrived in SoCal Thursday night, preparatory to our Friday morning flight, not feeling so great. Feeling pretty crappy, actually. Running a 102-degree fever, in fact. My immediate thought was that we shouldn’t travel—we could get the miles redeposited, stay put in Claremont, spend the week being still and watching the new TV DVDs I’ve gotten lately, and just attempt to ride out whatever bug had gotten him. He wanted to try to make the trip, though, and was convinced that it was just a 24-hour thing. And, in fact, the next morning when we woke up, his fever was way down, he was able to eat a bit of breakfast, and so we got on the plane.

It was not just a 24-hour thing.

R.’s had what I can only figure is some sort of very slow burn norovirus. The fever mostly subsided, moving between normal and 100-ish, but the nausea and its unmentionable cousins gradually intensified over the course of three days, and so Sunday morning I got him to go to a clinic, where they gave him an IV with anti-nausea meds, gave him two more prescriptions to deal with the symptoms, and sent us back to our hotel with instructions for a very restricted diet to be followed for the next few days.

The good news is that he’s gradually getting better, but is nothing like up to speed yet. The other good news is that, so far, at least, I seem to have been spared. But spring break has mostly been spent in our hotel room, with me worried like crazy and him in various stages of pain, discomfort, and unconsciousness. We’ve both gotten a lot of sleep, which is good. But it hasn’t been restful. And it hasn’t been celebratory. And it hasn’t been productive.

We’ve got a couple of days left, and so I’m hoping that his recovery will accelerate from here. In the meantime, I’m trying not to plunge into the depression I see beckoning at the edges of my vision.