Switching Coasts

Sports Thought: Here's a list of things I don't care about:
1) The SEC
Food Find: A restaurant in SF called The Cravery, which sells fast food gourmet pot pies. Dad got an herbed chicken and mushroom and I got this awesome Thai chicken curry one. Apparently they just opened one in the Coliseum too, so everyone go eat pies in the fall! Why this isn't a bigger trend, I'll never understand.
Good word: Today was really personified by the word FUMA. Coined by the eternal Katie Coulson and/or Kelly Conley, FUMA stands for Fire Under My Ass. Although initially referring to something like a deadline ("I can't write this paper without a FUMA"), today it was what got me through my various airports.
Accomplishment: Woke up on the East Coast, going to bed on the West.

Today was substantially more stressful than it should have been. The plan was simple: wake up at 5:30 am, get on the T to Logan Airport, get on my plane to Newark which left at 8:30, connect at 11 and fly to San Francisco. Simple.
What actually happened. So I set three alarms (since missing this flight would be a very, very bad event)--5:30, 5:35, and 5:40. One of the girls I was staying with, the indispensable Becky Martinez, offered me a second alarm clock, just in case. I refused. Hubris. So naturally, since I went to bed at 2 am or so, I sleep through the alarms. All three of them.
(Side note: I can really only think of two other instances when I've slept through an alarm. 1) Senior skate day in high school, in which I show up to school unshowered and unshaven virtually as the buses are pulling away. 2) My first day of work at It's A Grind (albeit the second time), when I had to be there at 5:30 am to open the store).
Luckily, it's only seven am when I finally get up, as opposed to 10 am or Friday. While I'm getting dressed, Becky Martinez pulls out another MVP-caliber performance and calls me a cab (since by now, there would be no way I could take the T and make it on time). I book it out of the suite (ten minute turn around from waking up late to dressed, with cab awaiting), and promptly get lost at Harvard. After calling Becky, the cab people, and various deities, I finally find out where I am and get going. For the most part, this leg of the trip ends up being boring. All I can say is, I'm glad I a) checked in the night before b) printed out my boarding passes and c) didn't check any bags and packed intelligently. The rest of this leg was pretty pedestrian, ending with me showing up to my gate about ten minutes before it boarded. Pretty nice for waking up an hour and a half late.

But, since I'm flying on two planes today, it's only fitting that I have two crises. The plane to Newark boards on time, and everything seems chill. They warn us there's some ice on the wings, and a bunch of maintenance guys go out and hose them off. Problem solved. At this point, the plane starts to taxi, I start to drift off. Thirty minutes later I wake up. We're still on the ground in Logan. Eventually the pilot comes over, tells us there are some mechanical problems, and we'll have to get a new plane. Well great. I've got about an hour and a half between when this flight lands and my next one departs, and there's no way I can get on a new plane in that time. The pilot then comes on again, twenty minutes later, and tells us just kidding, the maintenance guys fix it all and we're good to go. I sleep. We arrive in Newark (I can see the Statue of Liberty out the window), and the Continental people are there to help everyone get to their connecting flights. North Carolina and Japan have missed theirs, but everyone else is good to go. They point us to the airport carts to take us to the gates, just to be safe. I find one, ask the guy to take me, he refuses, instead pointing me of where to go. I assume since he won't drive me, it has to be close. Wrong. I cover the entire length of the Newark airport until I find my gate. They were holding the plane for me, and I arrived at exactly 11:20, when it was scheduled to take off. I was that guy. I get into SF, now I'm in Menlo Park, and everything is great.

So just to drive home the monster day Becky Martinez had for me, she also suggested that while I was in San Francisco (where I spent the whole afternoon), I check out the penny arcade, formally the Musee Mechanique. Located on Fisherman's Wharf, this place is essentially a big warehouse full of old and really old arcade games (why were there no Goosebumps novels set in this). Most everything runs for a quarter or fifty cents, and they were without a doubt some of the coolest machines I have seen. For example:
-"Jolly Jack," a creepy sailor puppet who laughs for like a minute and a half, switching from high pitched hysterics to low bellowing, all equally disturbing.
-An arm-wrestling game, which, for fifty cents, will rip your arm out of its socket (twice!).
-At least half a dozen player pianos
-Monkeys playing instruments???
-Five or six different machines which, for a quarter, will depict a little puppet getting its head chopped off in a guillotine.
-"Ask Ramses," in which you turn a dial to a certain question (in my case "Am I stingy?"), and a skull in a coffin shakes his head yes or no ("No").
I'm sure there were other cool ones, but we burned through our five dollars in quarters really quickly. If you're ever in the area, go! It's so worth it. And creepy.