Useless midwest snow

Sorry, it's been a little while since I posted anything up here. Partly that's been because I was in London last week, and it seemed silly to write a "blog from america" while I was there. Partly it's been because I've been dreadfully busy at work, and what free time I've had has been spent diddling on my new guiter (a cherryburst Gibson... mmm) and sleeping.

I was part of one of those nightmare travel stories earlier this week, flying from Raleigh (in North Carolina - no, I'd never heard of it either...) to Chicago. It's supposed to be a one-and-a-half hour flight, but in the end the trip took us about 11 hours because of some sort of srew-up with Chicago air traffic control. Firstly the flight was delayed for 2 hours in Raleigh, then we had to wait on the tarmac for half an hour while they negotiated whether we could leave or not. Then we tried to take off but bailed out halfway along the runway - apparently some sort of fuel pump wasn't responding properly, or someting equally worrying. So they checked that, and then we got off again.

(Phew. I'm flying back to Boston at the moment, and the turbulence is really quite bad. Makiiing it hrd to typee..)

We got about halfway to Chicago, and the captain came on over the barely-audible intercom to say that there wasn't room for us at Chicago and not enough fuel to fly around to wait for a slot, so back to Raleigh we went. Back at the gate, about half the passengers decided to get off, and about half stayed on in the hope we would get going again soon. The passengers that remained fell into 3 camps - the irate ones who took it out on the gnome-like steward, the ones who took it in their stride with a very British gallows-type humour (much rolling of eyeballs and "dear oh dear what a right royal palaver this is!" type stuff), and those who decided to sleep through it. Anyway, we took off again after an hour and made it to Chicago this time, a mere 6 hours later than planned. Not bad, considering. At least all the nonsense meant I finished by book - On Beauty by Zadie Smith. I'd highly recommend it - it's about a mixed-race, mixed nationality (American and English) family who live in the college town of Wellington, MA.

I spent the last day or so in Milwaukee, which is in Wisconsin a couple of hours north of Chicago. It's desolate up there - bollock-chillingly, eye-wateringly, astoundingly cold. It certinly stopped me smoking though - I could only take 3 or 4 drags before heading back inside, and had to keep passing the fag from hand to hand so I could thaw the other one. There was an awful lot of snow there which was something of a novelty, but I couldn't really see the point of it without mountains and something to slide down them on. Just cold wetness without the fun...

Anyway, I can't discern any reason why someone would possibly want to live in Wisconsin, so don't make a special trip there. Apparently it's famous for its cheese (the nickname on the car number plates is "The Dairy State") but I doubt it's particularly good. The fantastically names Mars Cheese Castle just over the border didn't look particularly appetizing, anyway:


Also for fireworks - apparently their laws about these (whatever they are!) are more lax than most , and the border with Illinois is lined with firework megastores, like the booze-cruise places in Calais. Very odd.