The blog is back, Jack

Finally!

We're up and running again. BlogOLink is back.

For a while, it was going passably well: Quasi-regular updates, musings on this and that, and the tale of the saga of the air conditioner. But then came the Great Black Hole...an information blackout that has descended for nearly seven months.

Well, I'm back, and I have a good excuse: Life is what happens when you have other plans, but getting married prevents you from making them in the first place. You must focus, concentrate, and Obey Your Wife.

You fall into new routines, once you're married. You come home at the end of the day, and have dinner together, or watch TV and eat, or watch TV. And you talk. Time on the computer -especially for the man of the house - becomes a string of stolen moments. You have to hop on when your wife isn't paying attention, lest she drag you off, or you must get there before her, or she'll spend the whole night gawking at pictures of dogs in need of adoption on Craigslist.

Eventually, you find your happy mediums. She realizes that she will never keep you away from the computer as much as she prefers, despite her pleas that you exercise more (well, we're working on it). You resign yourself to the fact that you will never be as buff as she, and you feel OK about it. She gives you time for silly hobbies like home computer flight simulator, and you accept the fact that, sooner than later, she's going to bring home a dog.

This is marriage, and so it goes. But you know you'd never be as happy - or enjoy life as much - without her. And so coming home is a pleasure every day.

Perhaps the sign that things in the new marriage are off to a good start, at least, is when you come home from work one evening and say the following to your wife:

"I just had this crazy idea at work today. There's an airfare sale on, and fares to Chicago are dirt cheap. I think I might go there on a Saturday next month...just to fly there and back. It will cost me $110. What do you think?"

About now, the average husband might expect to get a frown, a disapproving look, or an exclamation: "What? You moron! Why would you want to do that?!"

But not my lovely wife. She said, "I think you should go! I think you would appreciate it a lot, and you would have fun."

Score!

Here's the backstory: I wanted to catch a ride on a DC-9. They're a familiar sight to those of us Minnesotans who travel through Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport: slim jets with twin engines at the back of the fuselage and a red T-tail (not to be confused with the much smaller, and much newer, CRJ). Why? Because Northwest is the only airline in North America that still flies the DC-9 on regularly scheduled passenger routes. You'll see a few DC-9s working as cargo haulers, and you'll find them on just a handful of passenger airlines elsewhere in the world. Today, Northwest is the world's largest operator of DC-9s...significant because these planes were built before I was even born.

They're being phased out now, like the 727 before them, in favor of newer, more fuel-efficient aircraft. These are your Airbuses, your next generation Boeings, your Embrarer E-jets, and a new yet-to-be-developed line from Bombardier called the "C Jets." Northwest has the oldest fleet of any of the major U.S. airlines, and the DC-9s are a big reason why. Many of these planes were delivered from the manufacturer more than 30 years ago, to airlines like Eastern and Republic that don't even exist anymore. They're still flying today thanks to a regimen of regular and thorough maintenance checks...the same that any airliner in the U.S. undergoes.
DC-9 pilots have said the jet is built like a tank and flies like a sportscar. But within a few years, you won't hear them thundering through the skies above Minnesota any longer. Every era of aviation eventually comes to an end. And with a looming (possible) merger between Northwest and Delta, there was speculation that the retirement of the DC-9s might be moved up significantly. I didn't want to miss out on another chance to fly them.

So I took advantage of a cheap airfare and bought a round-trip ticket to Chicago for last Saturday. Departing Minneapolis at 9 a.m., and turning around at O'Hare and coming back to MSP over the lunch hour. Both flights on a DC-9. Now that's passion.

Saturday morning saw me up in the pre-dawn hours, and out the door at 7 a.m. for a drive to the Ft. Snelling LRT station park-and-ride. No sense paying to use the ramp at the airport when the park-and-ride was two minutes and $1.50 away by train. Snowflakes swirled through the air as I boarded. True to the schedule, two minutes later I was stepping onto the platform at the airport's cavernous underground LRT station. Up several flights of escalators, I found a check-in kiosk. Going through security was a snap, though I overheard one of the TSA guards tell another that what she was looking at in my bag, via the x-ray machine, was a big camera lens. Fortunately, no one asked questions.

I was at Gate G19 a few minutes later, and settled in a chair by the window to watch the snowflakes fall on the lineup of morning departures. When it was time to begin boarding our plane, the gate agent announced a 10-minute departure delay because of a problem with the plane's PA system. It was fixed by the time we boarded, and everything was squared away for a nearly-on-time pushback of flight 126. The engines spooled up to a throbbing roar.

Then we sat. Two minutes went by. Then the pilot's voice crackled over the PA: "Folks, from the flight deck, we have a hydraulic indicator here, and we need to figure out if we actually have a problem with the system or if it's just the indicator. So we're going to taxi back to the gate and get this figured out. It's probably going to take us 15-20 minutes. We apologize for the delay, and we'll update you as soon as we have more information."

I glanced at my watch. Just under three hours until my return flight from O'Hare was scheduled to depart. And now, another delay. Outside, the snow was falling harder, and the flakes were getting bigger...