Tuesday, Jan 27, 2004.
Today my attorney gets up, we find out that yet again, those wimps cancelled court over snow.
This turns out to be an immensely good thing, as my attorney finds the opportunity to have a heart to heart with the US Attorney, and talk some sense into him. No longer do they thirst for felony charges with 5 year minimum sentences in prison. Misdemeanor just to get me out of it is the word of the day.
This is a very good thing.
So my attorney gets lost coming back (did I mention they have the most fucked up road layout known to man?) and we make it to the airport 10 minutes after the plane takes off. We look for the itenerary. 'It's in your briefcase', I say to my attorney. 'Ok, which of your arms is it on?' …umm… you don't have it?' 'no, I thought you had it!'
He gets on the phone to the car rental place, who finds the briefcase and brings it to us, and we find out the plane has already landed by this point. We reschedule, and get nailed with a $50 fee for rescheduling.
So we rush through the security checkpoint. The TSA guy looks at the bottom of my ticket.
'Please sir, don't cross the red line. Stay here' (he backs up, watching me the whole time, and eventually hands me this yellow paper with a TSA logo on it.)
'What the hell is this?'
'You've been redflagged for a search, sir. Please don't put your items in the normal trays, we have special yellow trays for you.'
The lady looks at me strangely, and asks me to strip down to my socks, shirt, and pants, and put the rest on the conveyor, including my shoes.
I comply.
I get motioned to a special area, sequestered from everything else, where they run the metal detector wand over me with meticulous care for what seemed like 5 minutes, at one point even having me unbuckle my belt. I watch as they rifle through my briefcase, my clothes, and the laptop I was carrying (not mine, but I didn't tell them that lest they go apeshit on me).

Eventually they seem satisfied, and leave me a pile of my stuff and tell me to have a nice day.
Gee, thanks.

I look to see my attorney is undergoing the same treatment. haha. It's kinda funny, he was redflagged too.

So we get on the plane eventually, only to experience the most troubling landing of our lives. The plane wasn't experiencing normal turbulence at all during landing. It was tilting left and right, and touched down crooked. The pilot jammed the airbrakes on full throttle, and damn near gave us all whiplash. You could tell something just wasn't right. But nothing was acknowledged.

We made it to the gate, where I informed becky that 'Knuckles and Tails managed to wrestle the plane to the ground, and we made it back home safely'.

Then we find out that not only has my attorney lost our parking ticket, but we don't know what garage we parked in. I went to an airport employee, and muttered something about section B1, next to a building with big windows. 'Oh, you want the blue deck, it's that way'. What he didn't mention is that it's a long way that way, and we damn near freeze our ass off before we find a friendly airport shuttle lady who helped us quite a bit.
I finally make it home without incident, and collapse on the bed.