I thought I’ve had this post up a week ago, and I can’t even tell why it took me ’til now to get it out.

Along the line of firsts — I was on my first airplane (an hour into the trip) where an engine failed. (In interest of keeping you from getting all worked up — let me just say it was no big deal, I’m writing about it, right?) Anyway, so I’m half-way between Albany and Denver 30 some-odd thousand feet in the air, when I notice the plane is turning around. Normally this isn’t something I would notice because my head is usually buried in a book, but during this turn it caused the sun to shine directly in my face. When that happened I found myself wondering, “Why is the sun all of a sudden shining in my face?” Well a couple of seconds into that train of though a stewardess comes on the speaker and says, don’t be too alarmed but there is a problem with one of the engines and we are lowering altitude and turning around; the captain will be on momentarily with more information. The only *real* problem I see at this point is we’re turning around, so I go back to reading my book.

A couple of minutes go by and then the captain comes on, and says something like, folks we’ve got an uncontrolled vibration alert in one of the engines; we’ve gone through our checklist on what to do when this occurs; we came to the conclusion the only safe thing to do is shutdown the engine; however, don’t worry we’ll be fine with one engine.

Minutes later the stewardess was back on saying, “This plane can land fine with one engine, there is nothing to worry about.”

Shortly before we landed the captain was back on saying, “I don’t want you all to be alarmed, but fire trucks and other emergency vehicles will be following us down the runway; this is standard procedure.”

So we land at Scranton-Wilkes-Barre, PA airport a super small airport, and you guessed it, not a whole lot of flight options.

The thing I would later become confused about is that the airport is due south of Albany, we had to have been much closer to Pittsburgh; if we were required to divert why did we have to back track so much?

We sat in the airport for a hour before they even told us anything, which was we still don’t know what is going to happen. Anyway, it didn’t matter because the next flight wasn’t until 6pm and it was only 3pm. It turned out that there was a 6pm (fully booked) and a 7pm (not fully booked). Of course, the 6pm was the only one that would get me to my end destination on the same day. I had a seat on the 7pm and asked to be standby on the 6pm. I go up to the counter just before boarding and reiterate I really would appreciate being on the 6pm flight, and the guys says, “It’s still full, but if something opens up I’ll let you know.”

So they board, he didn’t let me get on, and he closed the gate — this is an important fact. I want to point out that the plane door is still open not more than 20 feet away from me on the other side of a piece of glass. Someone comes on the radio of the gate attendant, and says hey there were supposed to be forty people on this flight, but we only count thirty-nine. The gate attendant says, “Well I guess someone decided not to get on.” I jump up and say, “Can I have that seat?” And the gate attendant responds, “No, I’ve already closed the gate.” The plane is still sitting there door open, and will be for at least 10 more minutes, plenty of time for me to get on. At this point I feel compelled to point out this was a Delta (Comair) flight.

I’m stuck with the 7pm, to Cincinnati. It arrives at the same time the last flight to Denver leaves. Ironically there were bad storms in the area and a lot of flights were delayed, except the one to Denver. At the very least, Delta put me up in a hotel, provided dinner and breakfast. The next flight for Denver didn’t leave until 9am that morning. I had a seat on it and finally arrived in Denver 10am MST.

The rest of my trip involved long hours learning about Cisco’s managed firewall solution with the exception, that they took us to a *NICE* steakhouse. It was amazingly good.

At this point, I’m sure you’ve completely forgotten about the picture of the skunk, or at very least, you should be wondering what its significance is, right?

When I got home Friday night, there was a skunk scurrying down the driveway, and I scared the bejesus out of it as I came within inches of ending its life. However, it made it under the porch before anything as awful as that happened. Of course, I had my camera handy, and thought wouldn’t this make a great addition to the fury animals section of my photo album.