putting the j in jjosh

To be one of the teeming multitudes, to be part of a news story about
how many hundreds of people are stranded, to be some of those people.
it’s tiring. our flight from Chicago to jfk was canceled so they
switched us to connect in Charlotte NC and then when we got there last
night that flight was canceled too. we stood in lines, we ran to get
connections that weren’t there and we stayed on hold for an hour.

So we spent the night in Charlotte, at a Hyatt that was perfectly
pleasant. managed to get rooms and into bed for a decent night’s
sleep, even though today we all feel a bit fried, like we were up all
night partying.

Plus there are so many people here at the airport and we keep hearing
other stories that are far worse than ours:

– people who sat in their plane on the runway for 8 hours
– a guy who’s plane went out to take off, satthere for 2 hours, came
back to the gate, made eveyone get off, wait an hour, get back out,
back to runway, another 2 hours on the Tarmac then back to the gate
– a couple on their way back from jamacia (talk about re-entry blues)
who had to stand in line for 6 HOURS to get a ticket.

We were lucky enough to get in late last night and Maxine got a
sympathetic gate agent who went from telling us we’d be here until
Tuesday to getting us tickets for today to LGA. She printed the
boarding passes right there so we didn’t have to wait in the insane
and epic lines that greeted us when we pulled up to the airport this
morning. We were lucky to be in concourse D which didn’t even have too
bad a security line. Granted, at the moment Philly is still closed but
we can hope can’t we?!

Plus we had the mother of all perspective hits while in the security
line. an eldery Southern gentleman behind us was telling us that he
was having trouble standing for so long. Maxine told him to go ahead
and take abreak, sit down and we’d hold his place in line. he
appeciated it greatly and when he came back in line he told us a bit
about how he was diagnosed with throat cancer. He underwent chemo and
treatment for it, only to discover later he had been misdiagnosed. It
was actually a super rare fungus infection that he had contracted back
when he was a soldier in Vietnam. "Odds were one in 5 million…" he
told us.

Made being stuck in the airport seem like nothing.

when we got to the gate, there were cots all over the place, like
remnants of some battle that travellers had waged against the
storm…some people had it really rough…

the fellow in the cam shot below had built a sort of fort out of the
airport cots…he looked nervous, like peoeple were going to try and
take his land away…

I hope this flight happens…