Stuck at DFW

OK, here is sit at Dallas-Ft. Worth airport. Since I bought the tickets at the last moment, I didn’t really have much choice over what times my flights came/left. I had to get to the airport at 1:30 to wait for a 6:30 flight because everybody was leaving the hotel, and I wanted to bum a ride off of one of them rather than put out the $35 for a taxi. Yeah, I know, a five hour layover is nobody’s idea of a good time, but what was I going to do in Ft. Worth on a Saturday afternoon by myself? If I had remembered my GPS receiver, I probably have gone geocaching in downtown, but I forgot to take it out of my car at the airport.

I met a really interesting person here, though while eating lunch at the Texas BBQ eatery inside of the terminal. I was looking for a seat, but all of the tables had people at them, so I decided to sit at the bar and eat. When I went to put my stuff on the bar, a lady told me that I could sit with her at a 4-person table if I didn’t want to sit on the stools. She was probably in her upper 40’s, and was sitting alone at a 4-person table. I happily accepted the offer, because then I could sit in a chair, rather than a stool, and I would have somebody to talk to for a little while. We struck up a conversation about traveling for business, and she informed that she works for an eating disorder foundation, and travels a lot. I told her that I really don’t travel too much, and asked her how many children she has. Well, much to my surprise, she told me she has 6. Wow! Another person with that many children. The more I talked to her, the more I figured that our families are probably very much alike. Sure enough, she home-schools, and home-birthed. She had to stop at six children because of a physical problem with her uterus. She almost lost her sixth child in the womb, so they decided to get fixed. I can’t really blame her at all. If we were in that situation, we’d probably do the same. They really wanted seven children, but if I knew that we had a very high probability of losing the next child to a miscarriage, we’d probably do the same thing.

We talked to each other about two hours, then she decided to make her way to her gate. It was very cool thing to meet somebody with the same opinions as us on so many family issues.

I have about four hours to spend in the air, and I might want to run my computer while on the plane. I have no way to plug my PowerBook in on the flight, so I had to search for an outlet to plug my computer into at the airport. It took me abut five minutes of searching to find an out let to charge the battery for me, while I hammer out this blog. You’d think that an outlet would be a piece of cake to find in an international airport, but it was not easy. I eventually came across a guy working on a laptop in a deserted gate, and figured that he was probably using a nearby outlet to run his machine. Yup, sure enough, he was using one of the two outlets on the wall. Thankfully, the PowerBook has a nice long cord, and I was able to sit across from him and use the outlet.