Me in ME: Day 24 and 25

Wednesday was a nice, uneventful day. I got to sleep in until 9:00, and then spent the morning packing. I had lunch with my coworkers at a local sea food place where I had my first whole lobster. It was quite an experience. When the waitress brought out the "bug" (as Alton Brown refers to it), I kind of stared at it for a few seconds wondering "okay.... now what?". So I asked the waitress what to do with it. She suggested tearing off the tail and starting with that. So I grabbed the thing with both hands and savagely tore the tail off.

Now that I had dismembered the beast, I stared at it for a few seconds wondering "okay.... now what?". One of my coworkers had to tell me that I needed to take the shell off to get at the tail meat; a task easier said than done for an inexperienced eater. After a little work I had managed to separate a few pieces from its suit of plate armor and was finally able to dig into the legendary meat. A quick dip and a swish in some clarified butter, and it was time to eat. It was good, but not quite the awe-inspiring experience that I was expecting.

I finished off the tail in a few bites, and then I stared at the rest of the body for a few seconds wondering "okay.... now what?". Just then I remembered what I had seen on Good Eats. I took a hold of one of the claws (I could tell it was a left-handed lobster) and gave it a twist to separate it from what was left of the body. With a claw in one hand, I grabbed the nut-cracker they provided (I had only ever seen it used to crack nuts) and went to work breaking through some more armor. A few sickening crunches later I had liberated some more meat from the red fortress. It looked to me as if the bug had recently molted because the claw wasn't very full of meat. Another dip and a swish, and it was on to the other claw. Crunch, pull, dip, swish, yum.

Again remembering my schooling from Good Eats, I started working on the legs, but not in the sucking manner I've heard about (only "heard" because I've never actually witnessed someone first-hand consume a lobster). I grabbed one leg and started squeezing from one end like a nearly-empty tube of toothpaste. A tiny amount of meat oozed out, and it was time for another dip, swish, yum. After another seven repetitions of "squeeze, dip, swish, yum", I stared at the rest of the body for a few seconds wondering "okay.... now what?". I asked one of my coworkers "do I dig into the body", and they suggested not, so I called it done. It's a good thing I had a salad as an appetizer because for a 1 3/4 pound lobster, it wasn't very filling. And not really worth the $34 (cleverly hidden as "market price"), but I didn't worry too much about it since it was on the company credit card. Looking back I think it took me about as long to eat that lobster as it probably took you to read about me eating it.

After an uneventful afternoon at work (didn't go in until 4:00), I had a celebratory dinner with all of the guys from my company that were on the trip, and then I went to bed because I had a early morning ahead of me. With a flight at 6:00 and 30 minute drive to get to the airport and a recommended buffer of 90-120 minutes, I figured that we needed to leave at 3:30am. We got to the airport at 4:15 (after I got about 4 hours of sleep), and took care of the checking-in and getting our tickets. Since I was the only one of the three of us traveling together that had spent any time in Portland, I then left to turn in the rental car. Since Enterprise is not at the airport and they don't open until 7:00, I had to drop off the car at the Comfort Inn next to Enterprise (they have a deal for early drop-offs). To get back to the airport I caught the shuttle that Comfort Inn runs, the only problem is that they run it at 4:15, 5:15, and 6:15. The 4:15 shuttle was too early, the 6:15 shuttle was too late, so I guess the 5:15 should be just right.

The shuttle actually ran a little early, so I got back to the airport at 5:15. When I walked up to the security line, it looked like every carrier at the Portland airport had a 6:00 flight. The line stretched down a walkway leading away from the metal detectors before it double-backed on itself. Since you can't do anything but wait in a situation like this, I got in line and started thinking about how I was probably going to miss my flight. Sure enough, when I was a couple of people away from getting to show my ticket and ID to a worker, I heard the final call for my flight. At this point there were a couple of teenage or college boys who were in the same situation as me, but they were trying to talk the same worker into letting them cut in line so that they wouldn't miss their flight. Irony of ironies, their inquiry actually slowed down the line, and I just hoped that their stupidity wouldn't make me miss mine, too.

I got to the metal detectors as I heard the one-minute warning for my flight come over the loud speaker. With my departure gate literally in sight, I quickly kicked off my shoes, emptied my pockets, took off my belt (just to be safe), and loaded my carry-on bags into trays to be scanned. I walked through the metal detectors without a problem; my bags weren't as lucky. As my shoes and pocket-contents emerges from the little square portal, the X-ray operator said "I'm going to need you to separate out your electronics".

Problem. I had snuggly packed away my Xbox by wrapping it in a sweatshirt for protection, and I also had my dad's portable DVD player and camera packed in one bag and my company laptop packed in my other bag. Fortunately I didn't have to go back and unpack it, since the operator did this for me. As the contents from my two bags came out in six of those trays, I frantically stuffed everything back into my bags as I desperately tried to make my flight. Fortunately, I was in line in front of a guy whose wife had already made it through the line and had managed to hold the flight so that we could get on.

I had made my flight! After a one hour flight to Newark, a three hour layover, a four hour flight to Houston (with a one hour time change), a two hour layover, and another one hour flight, I was back in Waco. I walked off the plane to the sublime 70-degree and clear weather, which just about melted me in pleasure after I had endured 20-degree and snowy weather getting into the Portland airport.

I was home!