Got back last night from a six-day trip to eastern Canada to visit family. It was a good time to travel out of the country. Once we got past Houston, we were in the territory of “we celebrated Thanksgiving over a month ago” so the airports were no more busy than usual.
Air Canada has some nice new Embraer jets with personalized on-demand video screens in the back of each seat. You can watch a variety of TV shows, movies, news programs, etc, and there are USB ports for a not-ready-for-prime-time gaming system, too. Watched an episode of Mystery (Poirot) outbound, and an Italian/UK coproduction called Tickets on the way back. The latter was a neat, artsy film about several different stories that all take place on the same train traveling from eastern Europe through Innsbruck on the way to Rome. The tales only glance off each other, they don’t exactly interleave.
While we were in Canada, one lazy afternoon we watched the last half of U571 with Matthew McConaughey (I couldn’t remember how to spell his last name, so I Googled “Matthew” and “bongo”—first hit on the list) and all of The River Wild with Meryl Streep, Kevin Bacon and David Strathairn. We also saw Cars at our daughter’s apartment and were pleasantly surprised with it.
It’s always good to be back in Halifax, the city where I lived for eight years during the 1980s. The main reason for going this time was to visit our daughter at university, but we also managed to see my brother, sister and brother-in-law. I visited my doctoral advisor’s lab one day and we had dinner with him and his wife another evening. And we dropped in on
Of course, we ate far too much, but we ate well. Cooked turkey dinner on Thursday for our daughter and her roommates. Visited Tim Hortons several times. Relearned how to negotiate Halifax’s crazy system of one-way streets, no-left-turn intersections, frogger-educated pedestrians and street lanes that double as parking lots.
I took two books along with me to read and didn’t crack open either of them. I also printed out and bound the partial manuscript of my NaNoWriMo novel, intending to read through the whole thing, but I only managed 70 pages. I keyed in my revisions this morning, increasing my overall wordcount for the month by 500, to 52700. Two more days left in the month, so I don’t expect to get a whole lot more done by the end of the program, but everything from this point on is gravy.
Recorded many TV programs while away, so it’s going to take a while to catch up. Watched C.S.I. with Roger Daltry as the guest villain last night. Also caught up on Survivor (good call, Jonathan — who could have guessed those people could cling to a pole for two-plus hours?) and Amazing Race (phew—the blondes eeked through to try again another week).
