Snowly

We have had a huge amount of snow here - at least 6 inches - and the result is that WhereIlive looks (a) beautiful, and (b) quite like home. I LOVE snow. Have I said this before? I'm sure I have, but it bears repeating. I mean, I really love snow.

In honour of the snow I'm going to tell a story I would never tell to a crowd of strangers, but which I can tell on the internet because I can pretend no one's listening. Two years ago, I went to London over New Year to be with Mr. Fallen. I flew from Otherhome, and on New Year's Eve day in Otherhome it was perhaps fifty degrees F, with not a cloud in the sunny blue sky. I was so excited to be going. You know that excitement where you wish you could physically push time forward, and wish there was some way to make all intervening events happen faster so you could arrive at your conclusion as quickly as possible? That's how I felt.

We all got on the little RJ that was going to fly us from Otherhome to Chicago (where I would get the plane to London), and shortly after we taxied onto the runway the flight attendant informed us that we would be delayed because it had started to snow in Chicago. Okay, whatever. We sat there for twenty minutes, and then he came over the P.A. and informed us that we would be further delayed because the snow had caused Chicago to space more widely its incoming and outgoing flights. We sat there and sat there for perhaps an hour, and I stared out the window at the afternoon sun shining out of the crystal blue sky, thinking to myself, There can't be that much snow in Chicago if it looks like this here. And at the end of the hour the flight attendant's voice came again, telling us that we were going to delay still further because...CHICAGO HAD CLOSED THE AIRPORT DUE TO SNOW!!

And I wanted to stand up and scream, "I am going to London to get laid, and this plane will get to Chicago so I can catch my connection IF I HAVE TO FLY IT MYSELF."

But I didn't, and we sat on the tarmac for twenty minutes longer, after which we were cleared for take-off, and I thought, See? How much snow could there have been? Typical American overcaution. And when we got to Chicago there was a full-scale blizzard. (although we still departed reasonably on time. Someone on that flight told me that international flights, unlike domestic ones, are very rarely delayed, and even then not for very long.)

So what moral might we draw from this? Well, one possible moral is however much I love snow, I love sex with someone I'm attached to even more - a good moral, I think you'll agree. Another possible moral is that you shouldn't hold the announcements of your airplane personnel in dismissive contempt - and I will say that this experience taught me that moral, because I never have done so again. Or you could just take this as a random story that I find funny, which is how I take it.