Birds and de-icer (not together)

This week’s commute has me in an extremely reflective state. It seems that two weeks ago, on the flight I normally take from Calgary to SF, a goose flew into one of the plane’s engines and the aircraft was forced to make an emergency landing.

I wasn’t on the flight, I was standing on a beach in Carmel with La Niña because she wanted to get to California a day early. However, one of my co-workers was on the plane and he said it was a pretty scary experience… mostly because no one knew what was happening. They all heard the noise and could see the fire trucks and ambulances gathering around the runway but there was no communication from the cockpit (probably because they were busy).

I mulled this over for most of the flight. And, to add to the mood, we spent a large portion of it mired in fog. Calgary had freezing fog so we had to be de-iced. Seems the airport has changed its de-icer. I remember it being clear but this time around we were covered in green slime — and it looked like something that Slimer would do. As we took off I watched the slime stretch and roll around the wing-like green globs of snot before flying off the end of the wings.

San Francisco had a creepy fog… like something from a Stephen King novel. I kept feeling like I was floating from dimension to dimension in what seemed like the world’s longest landing.