An Eternity of Terminal Creeping

Yesterday went down as the most boring, most tedious, and most uncomfortable day in the history of people ever getting stuck in airports. I spent 19.5 hours traveling, 12 of which consisted of me staring at people walking by in the Atlanta airport while I exploited every seating arrangement possible between gates T1-T17. I didn't get arrested for it, but I did confer on myself The Creepiest Fidgeter award. I was in the airport for so long that my birth certificate actually changed itself to say "Tom Hanks" because the Universe starting blurring the lines between the movie The Terminal and my life. 



By the end of they day, I was too brain-damaged by the boredom to drive home from Eugene without making 97 wrong turns and then nearly missing my own driveway. I also suspect I had a dead-fish funk by the time I arrived, mostly because several cats gave me hungry looks as I drove by.




True to form as a thoughtful gift-giver, I brought Stephanie a t-shirt from the CDP that states "I Am Naked." It's magnificent, normally used for actors in the mass casualty event training, who apparently don't want to actually be naked when going through decontamination (if you had seen the volunteers, you would have not wanted them to be naked either).

Center for Disaster Preparedness

This week has been awesome. For one thing, I'm in Alabama, and have been able to jog past where every single scene from The Walking Dead was filmed (my assumption based off of the condition of the roads). Also, taxi drivers that smoke in their mini-van taxis with the windows up and admitting to having just "burnt one [marijuana joint]" right before picking up his passengers.

My primary instructor looks exactly like Willie Robertson. The other primary instructor is a real-life Mater from Cars. They both have personalities as big as their look-alikes, and have taught me many things including statements that I'm going to somehow fit into this blog entry. If you want to find pictures of them, look up Willie Robertson and Uncle Si.

We've been doing HERT (hospital emergency response training) including decontamination in Level C PPE. I sweat so bad in this Alabama heat it's like "a redneck trying to read" (-CDP Mater) and I end up literally POURING the sweat out of my rubber gloves into the trash can every time I take a break from the summer sauna.

Our group members have to help each other don/doff all their gear when we go in and out of our PPE; I have renamed it The Donner Party. This is what we look like when we get out of our PPE:
 

I met a terrific guy named Aymon who has had to pay multiple ransoms to free family members kidnapped by ISIS. On a final note, I also had an extensive discussion with a group of RNs from Grant's Pass about a coworker of theirs who has breast implants and doesn't wear a bra; I'm not sure how to provide better context for that discussion, so I'm just going to leave it there and hope you can cook something up with it.