Kevin Standlee: Fandom Is My Way of Life

Lisa continues to be on a day-sleeping schedule. She let me know yesterday that she wanted to go grocery shopping in Reno overnight, so I set the alarm for 2 AM (and managed about five hours of sleep), and shortly after 2:30 we set out for Reno.

There is a winter storm moving this way, with a high wind warnings. The wind was particularly bad through the Truckee River Canyon (the stretch of I-80 between Fernley and Sparks), and at times I slowed all the way down to 50 mph when the wind threatened to blow me off the road. I worried that some of the other people out there who think 80 mph is just fine in those conditions might rear-end me, but they just zipped past as I puttered along in the slow lane.

We were nearly the only customers at WinCo Foods, although as usual we had to dodge forklifts, pallet jacks, and lots of stuff stacked in the aisle as staff were restocking the shelves. We're used to that, though, and proceeded to do a significant restock.

We got home shortly after 5 AM and unloaded stuff without incident. The high winds have brought much warmer temperatures (with a high of +16°C/54°F, and well-above-freezing lows), which makes keeping the house warm a lot easier. I said good night to Lisa and got back to adding people to my new flip phone's address list who have been contacting me.

Lisa and Chris left downtown Reykjavik around 12:30 local time there today, taking the bus to Keflavik Airport. According to Lisa, it took a very long time to get their boarding passes, and even though they were there as early as they were told to be, by the time they finally managed to get their passes and clear Terrorization and make it to their gate, they were already boarding the flight. Alas, it was a full flight as well.

I was following the progress of the flight on FlightAware, so I saw that they arrived at Chicago O'Hare Airport around 18:30 local there as scheduled. But I did not hear from Lisa until just before Midnight Chicago time! Apparently what happened was that Chris and Lisa got separated while making the enormous journey through O'Hare to Immigration, and the trek was physically difficult for Lisa, who ended up sitting down to rest a bit. Helpful airport people put her in a wheelchair and whisked her through everything. Then things got strange. They pulled not only Lisa's luggage, but Chris' as well, and he was still back waiting to get through Immigration. Lisa told them to leave Chris' luggage there for him to claim, but they ignored her, and she found herself groundside with all of the luggage, while Chris was still airside wondering where Lisa (and his luggage) was, and there was no way for them to communicate. Airports don't page people anymore, and nobody would go back and get Chris to get him out. Hours passed with no communication and nobody able to help either Lisa or Chris, until Chris eventually (I presume with some desperation) came groundside and found Lisa.

I, of course, was getting increasingly worried about where they were. They were able to take the Blue Line into downtown Chicago and finally made it to their hotel. Checking in there actually gave me the first sign of life from them, because Chase decided that trying to charge my credit card as I had arranged for Lisa's stay was suspicious and sent me a fraud alert. I told Chase to approve the charge and called the hotel, and as luck would have it, Lisa was within range of the front desk so we spoke briefly. She desperately needed some food and drink, not having had anything for many hours, so she said she would call me back.

After Lisa got her F&B and got back to the room, she was able to call me from the room. Unlike almost every hotel in which they stayed in Europe, this Chicago hotel hasn't pulled the phones out of the hotel rooms. She was able to use her telephone credit card to call me from the hotel after finding out from the hotel how to make a call to her calling card. (There wasn't anything on the phone about how to get an outside line, apparently.) Anyway, Lisa filled me in on the madness that went on today. It was very late, but she did ask me to call her back so we could make sure that worked. So a bit after midnight (22:00 my time), I tried to call the hotel, which I'd done a couple of times before. This time the phone just rang and rang and then hung up. I tried several times without success. I presume the hotel shuts down their front desk at Midnight local time. Unfortunately, there's no way for me to tell Lisa this.

Lisa won't even be able to see this on her computer, because while she had been able to connect to DreamWidth at all of the hotels in Europe and even on the ferry to Iceland and in Reykjavik, she can't make it work in Chicago. So from her point of view, I never called her back. She may figure out what happened, and if it's urgent, she should be able to call me using her phone calling card, which should still have minutes left on it, but I hate having made it seem like I left her out to dry. On the other hand, it not only is very late there, but she's been up since early in the morning, Iceland time, so perhaps catching up on sleep takes priority anyway and we'll get it sorted out tomorrow.

Frankly, it appears that much of the problems going on here are based on a societal assumption that every single Real Human Being has at least one mobile phone, and that people who do not have such things don't matter and can be ignored. Even though I have two phones (one personal, one work), I find this a highly annoying assumption.