We had a bit of a bus adventure on Wednesday night when we headed up to Rocky Mountain National Park—but despite a few minor setbacks (most notably, two buses breaking down and our bus driver wiping out a stop sign in the park), I was able to get some great photos from the park.

I’m mostly enjoying my stay in Fort Collins thus far, thanks in no small part to the helpful bar staff at Woody’s Woodfired Pizza. I should have a few scenic photos up at Flickr shortly, although the big trip to Estes Park isn’t until Wednesday.

Tomorrow morning I head to Fort Collins (via DFW and Denver) to spend a week grading exams. Hopefully that’s not quite as bad as it sounds like it could be.

Actually, I’m dreading the ten hours on airplanes more than the seven days of grading. You’d think someone would have a non-stop flight from Raleigh to Denver, but no such luck.

I finally got back from the big road trip about 24 hours ago… except for a giant stack of mail that I’m still sorting through (and doubtless more at work), there’s no evidence that anything really happened while I was away. At least I get a little bit of a break until my next trip, although that’s just two weeks away…

Well, I made it safe and sound to Jackson with no real hiccups. The only real problems I had were a real downpour between Meridian and Jackson and the aftermath of a nasty-looking wreck just east of Birmingham on I-20; traffic was shut down westbound for a helicopter airlift from the scene.

I guess I’ll go out and find something to eat; one nice thing about visiting somewhere you’ve lived before is that there isn’t a lot of scouting work needed to find food!

Division of Labour links a Reuters piece that says ”[t]he day is coming when carriers will require special fees even to check a bag.” That day has already arrived in Europe, which you’d think Reuters (of all news agencies) would already be aware of.

I’m safely back in Durham after a rather dull and uneventful drive yesterday afternoon/evening. Now I’m watching the Giants suck horribly on Fox.

I’ve decided to head home Saturday afternoon once my panel wraps up at 12:45; after spending three weeks on the road, I’m ready to get back to Durham and a TiVo full of shows to catch up on while I finish up preparations for the semester—editing syllabi, futzing around in Blackboard, and putting together slides for 138 while I can still find my notes from last semester. And meandering back to Rock Bottom Brewery tomorrow night in the cold isn’t worth blowing $200 on the room, even if the waitstaff is cute.

I’ve made it to Marianna, Florida, which means I’m most of the way between mom’s and dad’s on the Great Holiday Roadtrip. So far, except for getting caught in rush hour traffic south of Birmingham, it’s been a pretty uneventful journey.

Most of the Alabama portion of the journey was accompanied by Steve Martin’s Shopgirl on four unabridged audio CDs, a recommendation from my dinner companion a few nights ago, which I purchased at the Barnes & Noble in Hoover. Not having seen the movie yet, I am curious how well it makes the transition to the big screen, as Martin uses very little dialogue in the original novella. Thematically, it may be something of a companion piece to Martin’s 1991 L.A. Story, although that film was much more broadly comedic than Shopgirl—which, at least in book form, is more poignant and melancholy than laugh-out-loud funny.

I’m still alive.

I had a nice Christmas here in Memphis, and now I’m getting ready to head down to Florida for New Year’s. I’ve made a bit of progress on a few projects; the main fun will be wrapping up my SPSA papers over the next few days.

After taking a free roundtrip ticket to wait five hours for a later flight, I’m back safe and sound in Durham; I think the only thing I missed was the Duke–Memphis championship game in what still ought to be called the Preseason NIT.

Oh, and Arkansas choked against LSU—there’s simply no other way to describe that performance.

My big debate for tomorrow: use my women’s basketball season tickets to see Duke dismantle Arkansas State or listen to the Egg Bowl over the Internet. Maybe one of these decades I’ll have a fancy phone that will let me do both at once.

Figuring out how I’m going to get to all the places I need to get over the Christmas holidays is becoming a bit of a headache; it’d be a little easier if SPSA weren’t the first weekend after New Year’s. With gas prices coming down I may end up taking a very long road trip around the southeast.

You can go home again; it just won’t feel much like home.

On the other hand, it was nice seeing a lot of folks again, and you can’t ask for better dinner companions than Kamilla and Andy (Sunday) and Kelly (Monday).

I just got back a couple of hours ago from Frozen Tundra country, where the weather gods almost managed to produce some real frozen tundra for my enjoyment. Instead, I just got bitterly cold winds and rain; I’d have preferred snow, to be honest. The interview process went about as well as can be expected, and of the Realistic Prospects™ I think it’s the place I’d enjoy working the most, but given the crapshoot nature of these things and the fact I believe I may have to give someone else (and maybe even two someone elses) an answer before these folks are in a position to make up their minds I’m not going to be getting my hopes up.

Even better, tomorrow afternoon I get to explore my fallback option at a nearby public institution: a demotion in academic rank and salary coupled with a doubling of workload, but a year-to-year renewable contract. Job security, it’s a good thing.

If you spend a lot of time on planes, do yourself a favor and invest in a set of Koss Spark Plug earphones for your portable music player iPod nano; they work a heck of a lot better than any of the active noise-cancelling headphones I’ve seen and won’t set you back anywhere near as much as the upmarket Shure and Etymotic brands, the marginal benefits of which will be drowned out by the jet engine roaring a few dozen feet from your head anyway.

I just wish I hadn’t paid $19 at Best Buy on Sunday for my pair.

Off to the interview (hopefully the first of many) in 48 hours or so. Sometime in there I need to grade the exams I gave my intro class today and prep for my job talk and teaching presentation, in addition to the typical travel nonsense (packing, figuring out which bags to take, getting rid of anything that might look like a knife to an undertrained x-ray jockey, etc.).

Update: And, I just found out I have to do this all again up in Frozen Tundra country in another week.

Patrick @ OxBlog:

ABBREVIATED LIST of places cheaper to fly to from London than Washington, D.C.: Johannesberg, Tokyo. I’m leaving out other less interesting ones, such as, for instance, everywhere else in the world.

Patrick omits the most important factor here, though… even if it were cheaper, you’d still have to fly out of Dulles.

Kamilla, somewhere between Istanbul and Kyrgystan, gives some advice to global aviation authorities:

We all would be more civilized and less stressed if there were more clocks in airports; I don’t understand why, since it’s THE place of changing time zones, they only announce the local time once, if that, as you’re landing.

I noticed yesterday, while engaged in an ultimately futile effort to switch the hard drive on which Windows XP is installed on my Athlon XP box, that I had a bunch of photos on the hard drive from spring 2001, from just after I bought my now-aging Olympus C-2100UZ.

So now they’re on Flickr: vacation (well, actually, Western Political Science Association conference) photos from Hoover Dam in March 2001, and a few Ole Miss photos from April 2001 that I took for some website work. Hope you enjoy them!

American Airlines’ pathetic campaign to protect its monopolistic practices in Dallas-Fort Worth has reached a new low with this jaw-droppingly asinine press release that actually accuses Southwest of monopolistic behavior.

On the heels of two Dallas-area congressmen introducing legislation to repeal the Wright Amendment and evidence that DFW Airport tried to cover up findings by its own consultant that ending Wright would lower air fares, DFW board members like Dallas’ mayor are even recognizing that Wright’s days are numbered—but American still isn’t budging. (þ: Xrlq and Vance of Begging to Differ)

If you go to North Carolina, you’d probably expect you won’t see anything from Jackson there. If you did, you’d be wrong:

More photos from Duke and Durham are over in my Flickr photostream.

Well, I managed to get back from Durham OK today in more-or-less one piece. I don’t think I’m entirely conscious at the moment, since I had to get up at 6:15 Eastern to make my flight, but that’s OK. I think I have an apartment, but all the i’s and t’s aren’t properly dotted and crossed yet. Durham photos coming sometime soon. Last, but not least, huzzah and kudos to the incomparable Kelly (and Friday) for a ride back from the airport.

I made it safely to Durham on time and in one piece, thanks (in no particular order) to Kamilla (who got me to the airport), Southwest Airlines, and my rental Pontiac Bonneville. I did a bit of driving around after checking into the hotel, and found my way over to Borders in Chapel Hill (where this entry is being posted from).

Now the tough part—finding somewhere to live next year—which begins in earnest tomorrow.

The Wright Amendment is back in the news, as Southwest Airlines (my new favorite carrier—$220 round-trip tickets from JAN to RDU will give you the warm fuzzies, as will non-stop flights to my favorite city in North America) is stepping up its lobbying effort to get the flight restrictions on Dallas’ Love Field repealed.

Vance of Begging to Differ links a study that shows Dallas has the highest airfares of any major U.S. city, and the lack of competition with American Airlines at DFW, particularly now that Delta has shut down its Dallas hub due to its financial problems, is pretty clearly the cause.

American may have also dug itself a bit of a hole in trying to protect its fortress hub at DFW: the Kansas City Star reports that American reneged on promises it made Missouri lawmakers when it took over TWA, and the new chairman of the Transportation Subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee is none other than Kit Bond of Missouri.