I’m back now. The last day was relaxing, mainly because we didn’t have to pack up and check out before 11am, as we did for most of the rest of the trip. I felt pretty lazy all day. We walked from the hotel down to the the famous Pike Market, where normally there are guys throwing fish around and stuff. But since no one was buying fish that day, there was just a crowd of tourists standing around the fish vendors, who were tossing a lemon around to keep themselves amused.

We had lunch at the Athenian, which is inside the market, overlooking the water. Tom Hanks and Rob Reiner filmed a scene from Sleepless in Seattle here. The antique eatery provided a nice environment. The food was somewhat expensive and mediocre though. Oh well. You can’t have everything I guess.

After lunch, we headed up to the Seattle Art Museum. They had quite an ecclectic collection of paintings, sculpture, costumes, and photos. Going from one room of contemporary aboriginal art to a room of Renaissance paintings was a bit jarring, but still fascinating.

That night, we met my sister Jadine and her boyfriend/semi-fiance Dave for dinner at Ray’s Cafe.
I neglected to mention that I noticed Jadine’s new, stylish and modern hair cut. Well, I did notice it, and it looks great. So if Jadine’s reading this, consider it noticed!

The next morning we had to get up at 5:30am to return the Cookie Monster, and to get to the airport for our flight home. We should have gotten up at 5:00am because our flight was actually leaving 30 minutes earlier than I had noted in my organizer. Whoops. Anyway, it all worked out ok. The flight back was uneventful and pleasant-ish. Even the small Embrauer jet we were on had personal TVs in the seatbacks, which I think is the single most important aviation invention ever. It keeps you from wanting to claw your face off from boredom during long flights.

When we got back to Laura’s place, I discovered that Emeril had decided to die during my absence. It’s nice to be missed, although, not so nice to have to call CAA to resolve the situation. Turns out that my battery is already dead and needs to be replaced. I’m appalled that my 2 year-old car already needs a new battery, but what can you do? The CAA guy says it’s not uncommon these days. Things just aren’t made like they used to be!

I finally got home, and proceeded to dump my stuff everywhere like I normally do when I get home from a trip. Except, since I’ve moved all my rooms around, nothing is where I expected it to be, so dumping my stuff was a bit confusing. Basically, things are everywhere now. I’ll figure it out later!

Ok, ok, Mother Nature, we get it. You can snow. Now you can stop it.

I think I’m seriously cut out for warmer weather. It’s a shame I like being Canadian so much, because I wouldn’t give up living here, even if I could enjoy a more pleasant climate. Maybe when Canada annexes Turks and Caicos, I will have some relief.

My trip home from Montreal on Wednesday night was something of an ordeal. My flight was scheduled for 7:50pm. I got to the Montreal airport at 7:15pm, because I’d signed up for flight updates by SMS. Since I didn’t get any notice there was a problem with my flight, I optimistically arrived on time. Of course, at 7:16pm, the notice arrived on my phone. The flight was delayed until 8:40pm. “And so it begins,” I said out loud, to no one in particular. I settled into a seat in the gate waiting area to see what Air Canada’s definition of 8:40pm would eventually be.

At 8:30pm, it was clear that the flight was not leaving. No one was standing at the gate, getting things ready for departure. There was no call to prepare to board the flight. Soon enough, the time of departure was updated. 9:50pm. Around that time, I got the notification on my phone about the new delay.

At 9:40pm, there was still no sign of movement. I looked at the big LCD monitors to see the latest estimate. 11:15pm. There was no notification by SMS. I guess the SMS-sending computer was embarassed.

By 11:00pm, we finally started boarding the plane. The airport was mostly empty by this point. I thought that was a relief. There should be little delay getting off the ground. Wrong.

At 11:30pm, we were still sitting in the plane at the gate. The door to the plane was still open, which I took to be a bad sign. Eventually, the pilot spoke over the PA system, letting us know that we’d be on our way as soon as they could get a ground crew to load the luggage onto the plane and push us out to the taxiway. What?! They delayed the flight by three and a half hours, and didn’t know they’d need a ground crew?!

There were a few sporadic messages from the flight deck over the next 40 minutes, apologizing for the delay. There was a heated exchange between the flight attendant, and someone who poked his head into the plane from outside. Apparently no one wanted to load luggage onto our plane. We could see other ground crews assisting other flights in adjacent gates. None of them came over to our plane when they were done.

By about midnight, a ground crew arrived from a different terminal to load our plane. After that, things went rather quickly. We were in the air by about 12:25am. I have to say this was not Air Canada’s finest… er… four hours.

In other news, I took the plunge and ordered a new computer. My old one was inexplicably turning itself off at random times, often while I was in the middle of working on something. Not only is this a recipe for data corruption, but it’s highly annoying. Instead of spending hours and hundreds of dollars trying to troubleshoot the many possible causes for this, I decided to replace the guts of the machine. The old one, while perfectly fast enough for my needs, was about two or three years old, and didn’t really owe me anything.

I’ve spent the last day or two setting up the new machine. It’s a quad-core Intel processor, which is the current best bang-for-your-buck for running Photoshop. I also put 4GB of nice fast DDR2 memory in there. I replaced the power supply with a quiet 500W model too, in case the old one was causing my sudden shut-down issues. I also caved in and got Windows Vista Ultimate. I hadn’t been planning to get Vista, but I figured if I was going to start from scratch, I might as well give it a shot. It turns out to be not as bad as I had thought. Most of my software seems to run on it, and it’s certainly prettier than XP. The new processor chews through my camera raw files like lightning. I like it!

So, I’m finally feeling at home again. I’ve got my computer set up how I want, and I’m back in my comfy loft in Hamilton. It’s snowing like mad out there. This is not a bad place to be.