movin' movin' movin'

Traveling again. Coppertop’s spending a month in Santa Barbara for training, so I flew up last night. We were up late packing the car, then got up at 5:30 to get gas, get breakfast, drop off some paperwork, and drive down to SB. We go there to find the apartment manager hadn’t left the key, but the door to Coppertop’s apartment was unlocked. It looked like they’d just finished shampooing the carpet but hadn’t done any dusting yet. Since the apartment manager had left for the day, Coppertop left her a message and we started unloading, making beds, putting away pots and pans, and so on. An hour and a half later the place was looking more like a home away from home and she dropped me off at the Santa Barbara airport. Now I’m waiting for my flight, too tired and brain-fried to update outlines. Maybe I’ll try to nap on the plane and hit the outlines once I get home.

United Express is running late. The plane from SB to LAX was late because that aircraft was delayed flying down from San Francisco. They just announced the LAX to Palm Springs flight was late because the aircraft was there, but the crew was delayed coming in from Utah. My connecting flight’s also late for unspecified reasons. It sounds like they have such an interconnected mesh of aircraft and crews plying complex routes that a delay in one part of the system, or bad weather in one part of the country, winds up rippling all over the system. It seems odd that these little turboprop EMB 120’s would need such a complex schedule to operate efficiently. They seem ideal for the sort of milk run Southwest does: fly LAX to Palm Springs, turn around and come back, and repeat. It makes me wonder if United Express’s schedule is something they designed or if it just evolved that way.

OK, if I ramble much longer, I’m going to start drawing parallels to fault tolerance in computer programming and then there’ll be no stopping. So I’m signing off while the signing’s good. Talk to you later.