High Flying, Adored

I love love love having an apartment in Chicago. It's so nice knowing I can just get on the train after work instead of running from gate to gate trying to find a flight I can get on. And now, instead of bidding for trips that have the most nights away from home, I can try for "locals," trips that start and end on the same day, like a normal job! The downside is that locals are usually made up of a bunch of short flights back and forth to places like Milwaukee or Peoria - prime targets for Air Traffic Control delays when the weather is bad. And the weather is always bad.

After finally recovering from the longest Winter ever, we are now in some kind of monsoon season where the visibility is always low and the winds are always gusty. In the past few weeks I have been stuck on the ground with a planeful of people in 90-degree weather for more hours than I care to remember. Luckily, there is a policy in place for these types of situations and we have an Extended Delay Kit onboard to be used if we're away from the gate for more than two hours. Unluckily, this "kit" consists solely of ten boxes of generic granola bars. Because what better snack to give to someone on a hot summer's day when the bottled water ran out an hour ago?