Nels Lindahl — Functional Journal

A weblog created by Dr. Nels Lindahl featuring writings and thoughts…

Day 74 the one with a ton of time at the airport

2018: Day 74 the one with a ton of time at the airport
Word count 163,146 + 1,068 or 164,214 of 1,000,000

Dear Reader,

Yesterday was a total wash. I sat down late in the day to engage in some writing. That late night writing session just sort of fizzled and failed. My sprint to 3,000 words was more or less a complete and total epic fail. I didn’t even hit the 500 word mark. Today is going to be better. A lot of that hope has to do with how long I’ll be stuck at the airport today. My flight is about 2 hours away from boarding. That should be plenty of time to engage in some writing. People are milling all over the airport. They all seem to be trying to dip into a restaurant or shop to grab some semblance of dinner. This terminal does not have enough spots for people to sit down and eat. It really only has enough room for them to mill around.

Some place sold me two shots of espresso and a blueberry muffin. It was an ok blueberry muffin. I’m guessing it was better around breakfast time today. All these hours later it is past the prime moment of freshness. That did not stop me from devouring it and looking around to see if anybody was laughing at me. You can imagine that the blueberry muffin did not last all that long. Neither did those two shots of espresso. That was enough fuel to engage the writing process tonight. I’m hopeful that between this time right now and the time during the flight a ton of writing will occur. I probably will not be having any more blueberry muffins today so that process is over. Writing however should keep going assuming everything works out ok.

It may not work out very well. At the moment all I want to do is catch up on college basketball scores and coverage. Today the Jayhawks played and I have not seen or read about the game at all. I’m pretty much avoiding all sources of content until later tonight when I can watch the game. This is the time of year where college basketball is everywhere. That will make it hard.

Topic 1: On the airplane

This flight has DirecTV and apparently I can watch Thor: Ragnarok from Marvel Studios during the flight. You may have already guessed that is pretty exciting and something that should be pretty fun. Last time on a flight with a movie I got to watch Wonder Woman. Oddly enough being able to watch a movie on the airplane flight is still an exciting thing. It is one of those experiences that will probably be commonplace for future generations, but the idea of having DirecTV on an airplane is still an interesting use of technology. It looks like the movie is now counting down until the start. A time is showing 18 minutes and some change in the upper left corner. I’m probably going to watch the trailer for the next 18 minutes and be utterly captivated by it. This is one of those flights where I am hoping to knock out at least 3,000 words. It is dark outside right now. That means that a beautiful skyline will not be able to distract me. Writing and watching some Thor will be the co-equal goals for this flight. At this point, I have not even booted up my best of Tears for Fears album. My Bose Qc35 wireless headphones are currently plugged into the seat using the oddly strongly proprietary cable they provided in the case. It has one normal end and one really tiny end that seems to be tailored to the headphones.

Ok —- we are pushing back from the terminal. Things are about to get going. We will hit that few minutes of take off that I really do not enjoy. Landing does not really bother me, but that initial climb to cruising altitude always disrupts my routines. I’m hoping that listening to some Thor will distract me from the details of the process. Perhaps more importantly I’m hoping that flying out of Chicago today does not involve any turbulence. It just might. They do call this place the windy city. This Boeing B757-300 seems nice enough. It has these tiny little televisions and DirecTV. I’m guessing that it will also offer wireless internet for a small fee here shortly. I just converted my Chromebook to tablet mode… this is the first time I have used the screen to type. I cannot type without hunting and pecking. Apparently, the tablet keyboard mode of the ASUS C101P Chromebook does not work for my brand of typing. Using that for a long period of time would not have worked out in a positive way. I gave up on that style of typing pretty quickly and went back to the keyboard.

I think my goal for the weekend is to get back to working with a 24 hour buffer for my blog posts. That might mean when writing two posts today by splitting my writing time in half. I may just write to 2,000 words and then switch to a different Google Doc. Maybe that is the best course of action at this point. Overall my goal is to spend less time writing about the process of the journey and more time recounting the path based on each memorable moment. Along this journey their will be so many moments to recount, to muse about, to help inform how the journey has impacted my life. That is probably the cornerstone of this writing effort. It looks like a ton of airplanes are backed up right now to take off out of Chicago O’Hare International airport. None of my writing so far has benefited from spell check. I have not been connected to the internet. I can see three airplanes waiting to take off on the runway next to our. It seems like a backlog must exist here at about 20:14 hours tonight. The weather overall seems fine here so this must just be a logistics problem of some sort.

Thor: Ragnarok is staring right now and we are beginning to take off. Take off took a few minutes of my time to reorient. Now I have connected to the internet and we are cruising along.

Dr. Nels Lindahl
Broomfield, Colorado
Written on my Storm Stryker PC and or my ASUS C101P using Google Docs


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