Just sitting in the Calgary airport waiting for my flight back to Houston.  I’ve been here for about 45 minutes and observed a few interesting things:

- The guy who checked me in at Avis was a disaster.  I had to wait around for 5 minutes before he showed up and then he overcharged my card because of some glitch on his hand held check-in computer.  He said it would only take a few minutes to reverse, but I’d have to walk somewhere, wait in another line.  So I’ll be calling them later to have the charge refunded.

- The US Customs officials were the best I’ve had in a long time.  Generally the customs agents are less than talkative and you’re just another person passing through.  The guys today were joking about beef jerky, where they buy it and the like.  Just pleasant and a departure from the everyday customs agent.

- No airport lounges in the C concourse.  I was hoping that Air Canada or someone from the Star Alliance would have a lounge available to leech wifi, grab a drink and relax before the flight.  No dice and somewhat disappointing.  I hope this changes because all airports should have lounges that I have access to  :)

- The Telus paid for wifi is actually very decent.  Only available in b, no g, but still excellent.  Enough to connect to the work VPN, download some content for the plane and catch up on some work.

- I just upgraded my blog to the most recent version of wordpress.  It looks like the previous version had some issues with it out of the gate that weren’t caught in testing.  If you’re running an older version, you should probably upgrade.

- The guys who work at the airport Harvey’s (Canadian fast food joint) have a pretty slack job.  There’s like four on staff and only one of them is working the counter.  The others are relaxing in the customer seating.  And they rotate every 20 minutes or so.  Not a bad job if you can deal with the pay and the stink of grease on your skin/clothes.

- It is cold here in Calgary.  The weather isn’t even close to what Houston has to offer.  It will be nice to get back to the warmth.

That’s all I got for now.

I’m in Calgary for a couple of days to attend to some family issues.  Left Houston Friday morning at the crack of dawn and got into Houston around 11.  Coming from warm weather and flying over snow just doesn’t feel right.  Getting off the plane into 32 degree weather made me quickly realize that the warmth of Houston isn’t a bad thing.

I flew up on Air Canada on one of their newer CRJ 705 aircraft.  Power in every seat along with a full on-demand video and audio entertainment system.  Between having power for my laptop to get some work done and the ability to select a movie sure helped the 4 hours go by quickly.

I should be flying out of Calgary around 7 Saturday night and heading back to Houston; should be back in town by 11 PM.