Yes. Really. I got up early as usual and decided after to go back to bed with a cup of tea. Then I made a cup of coffee and retired again. I’ve decided to be a bit decadent this morning and try to take it slow and spend some quality time with my laptop doing some long overdue things such as replying to a number of emails, and….. shopping!
No, I’m not buying lots of shiny toys. It’s plane tickets and train tickets. For work travel. Three separate trips. Lots of planning, poking about on the calendar, hunting for good slots for flights, anticipating delays and building in appropriate lag times, coordinating various errands and meetings here and there… Basically, looking into the future and squeezing parts of it into some sort of shape. A scaffolding, as it were, for draping the details onto later.
One annoyance and one delight:
(1) Why do airlines insist on assuming that people prefer aisle seats over window seats? For years I’ve wondered this and I still can’t understand it. The advantage of being able to try to rush out of the plane first is, in my opinion, vastly outweighed by the twin advantages of not being bashed by the service trolley while dosing, and being able to look out of the window at the city you’re landing in, or the landscape over which you are flying. And surely looking out of the big metal can you’re flying in is almost always preferable to not being able to while stuck inside it for many hours… (Now that flights are almost always full, there’s no longer an advantage to trying to get middle section aisle for long flights in case it ends up being empty and you can then lie along the whole section and sleep. That used to be the only advantage to booking an aisle that I could think of.) Two of my flights would not allow me to electronically select seats and so the choice made for me automatically got aisles, I think. And for transatlantic portions too. No doubt if I call a real human being at the airline to get it changed there’ll be a charge for this service. Annoying.
(2) I love it when things work together smoothly as they should. Having booked the flights and seats I then click on the itinerary and it (at my request) dumps the information about the flight times and numbers into my ical calendar. Another click later on and it’ll be on the calendar in my iTouch, and also on my office computer later on. And onto my phone. All rather excellent.
Ok, maybe I’ll allow myself a vice for a change and buy one little shiny thing…
-cvj
I prefer the aisle seat because there is slightly more leg room, and because I like being able to get up (to use the toilet, to get something out of a bag, or to stretch my legs) without disturbing the person sitting next to me. For shorter flights (which I try to avoid) it isn’t as important, but for long ones I always choose the aisle seat. They’re often overnight and so high that you can’t see much out of the window anyway.
On discovering this morning that I had no milk to go in my tea, I went back to bed – and read blogs. I had a late-night Amazon session earlier in the week though… 🙂