This is Your Captain Speaking

Everyone groaned when he spoke. He announced that our gate was occupied--which means that even though we landed around 11:03 PM, we'll actually get off the plane around midnight. For reasons I don't understand we can't use the adjacent gates even though they're empty. Maybe there are only so many gatekeepers to go around. I miss Ecuador, where we could probably have just gotten off without a gate at all and walked across the tarmac into the airport.

At any rate, to pass the time, I've accessed Logan's wireless network from on board and am writing this blog while also cyber-witnessing a Clippers blow-out (unfortunately, the Clippers are at the wrong end of it.)

Just after I last posted, the man running the cybercafe in Guayaquil's airport asked me if I could help him find flowers for his girlfriend, who lives in Canada. We visited 1800flowers.com and ftd.com together before I remembered that I might miss my flight, at which point I dashed off--and found one more alpaca, this one mounted on a bell, along the way.

What I read today: in the morning I finished Peace Like a River, which wove a wonderful narrative out of asthma, miracles, North Dakota and a bit of Huck Finn. Later I read Joe Haldeman's Guardian, a surprisingly soothing tale of the Alaskan gold rush mixed with sodomy, parallel universes and shapeshifting birds. However, I'm not sure that he completely captured the voice of a 70 year-old woman looking back at her life in the late 19th century. To me the narrator sounded very modern and man-like. Then again, I've never been 70, a woman or a citizen of the late 19th century, so I wouldn't know for certain. It kind of reminded me of a novel, Nadya, by my other science fiction professor, Pat Murphy, which also featured a woman seeking a new life in the Wild West, except that one had werewolves and was (at least) R-rated.