Shelter Island Hallockfest

Last month, I took my last trip to New York until 2018 (sob!), and as usual, it was an absolute whirlwind of a long weekend. I think I slept about twenty-eight hours total from Thursday night to Tuesday morning, which is a far cry from my preferred 8-10 hours per night. But a bit of fatigue is a small price to pay to cram in as much time with the people I love as possible! This trip was no ordinary jaunt home, however: I was there for a long-expected Hallock family reunion on the island where my dad grew up!

2016 in Review

2016 is generally regarded as a pretty crap year, bordering on cursed. (Possibly.) And while I'm a pretty optimistic person, I'd say that this bad reputation is well earned. From the rise of actually terrifying far-right politics worldwide to the election of a president who seems more likely to start a nuclear war with each passing day, 2016 hasn't given me all that much to applaud on the current-events front. But as I said, I'm a naturally sunny person, so I'll look for the silver linings wherever I can, and draw strength from the good things to keep fighting for a better world in 2017.

In that spirit, I present my own personal highlights reel for 2016:

Ready for Takeoff

Today I've got a hot date with a backscatter X-Ray and a very large machine. In other words, Jeff and I are flying back to Chicago this evening after a wonderful first Christmas together in New York. While I'm bummed to be leaving, I'm still so happy that he was able to be here for Christmas for the first time ever! (Christmas dinner post to follow soon, I promise!)

Heading back to the Land of Always Winter (pictured above)

My Charity-Shop Haul

Admittedly, my priorities for my trip to England last month were a bit unusual. Apart from having a proper English breakfast, eating Scotch eggs, and going to English chains like Primark and Marks and Spencer, I was most excited to try my luck in the charity shops. For my American friends: charity shops are secondhand stores whose proceeds go to a specific charity (i.e. Oxfam and the like.)

Happily, while Jeff was at his conference, I got to live the dream!

Cambridge Tiki Time

Looking back on our trip to Cambridge, I'm astounded by how much we crammed into each and every day. Jeff and I aren't really the lounging-on-a-beach types: as you may have guessed from my first Cambridge post, we go hard on vacation.

An American in Cambridge

For almost as long as I can remember, I've been a total Anglophile. (There's a brief period of my life before I knew what England was, and I'm pretty sure I have memories from then.) Growing up, I remember reading loads of books featuring plucky English children (my favorite will always be Ballet Shoes, closely followed by A Little Princess and The Secret Garden). Between those books and the Paddington Bear my father brought me on one of his work trips to London, a lifelong obsession was born, one which only grew stronger when I discovered John Stuart Mill.

If you follow me on Instagram, you might already know that I finally got to live the dream a couple weeks back, when I tagged along with Jeff for a conference in Cambridge! I generally make a point of trying to control my expectations, so as to avoid disappointment, but I was too excited to expect anything less than the most awesome trip ever. Luckily, this is exactly what I got!

World's most excited, unabashed tourist. Thanks to Devinne from Mox and Socks for giving me the most perfect dress to fly halfway around the world in!

Big in Japan

By the time you read this, I will (hopefully) be in Cambridge, England, but for once in my life, I've tried planning this blog ahead, so I'm writing this when I really ought to be packing.

Believe it or not, this is not my first blog. Way back in the day, I had a Livejournal, in which I posted snippets of conversations, Pointedly Cryptic Thoughts, song lyrics, and a smattering of pretentious garbage. The other night, though, I remembered my other blog: the one I kept during my semester in Japan over a decade ago. On a whim, I decided to see whether it was still there, and miraculously, it was. Epic travels down Memory Lane ensued.

December 2005. Look at the size of that digital camera!

Don't Fly American!

I'm in New York again! Getting here was an absolute nightmare, unfortunately. It's like I used up my lifetime allotment of travel-related luck while I lived in LA, or maybe the problem is that O'Hare is literally the unholy child of Satan and mom jeans. 

Before I commence ranting/warning you off of American Airlines on pain of rage, misery, and frustration, let's look back to an outfit from a happier/not dreadful day!

I've written about why I love this skirt before, and it's become one of my go-to 'omg, need to get dressed in five minutes because Jeff already has his shoes on and is waiting at the door' pieces. I loved wearing it so much that I even bought the black one! 

I liked the idea of pairing gingham and polka dots, and it turned out to be one of those things that worked just as well in practice as in theory. (Score!) I added this ancient red-and-green belt, red flats, and my new dinosaur brooch from Erstwilder, went out to dinner, and felt like absolutely 1,000,000 bucks!

Top: Anthropologie

Skirt: Modcloth

Belt: some thrift store in LA

Shoes: Zulily

Brooch: Erstwilder, from Pinup Girl Clothing

Ok, back to teeth-grinding, appetite-killing rage. This, my friends, is a tale of Why You Should Avoid O'Hare and American Airlines Like the Plague. 

In case you haven't heard, Chicago has been having insanely long security lines recently, owing to some TSA-related nonsense. Sidebar: Hallocks are well-known (among those who know us in real life) for getting to the airport stupid early. (What if something went wrong?!? What if someone [ahem] told her parents that her flight was out of JFK when really it was LaGuardia, like that one time in 2011?? What if I made parenthetical remarks within parenthetical remarks?!?) so when I found out that it was taking people THREE hours to get through security, I rearranged my entire work schedule so I would be sure to make my flight. 

You can probably guess what happened next. I arrived THREE HOURS AND FORTY-FIVE MINUTES before my flight. This is actually a new Hallock record. However, the firestorm of attention on O'Hare's greater-than-usual dysfunctionality actually achieved results, so while the line was quite long, I was through in 20 minutes. 

Ok. I ate my sandwich, then got on standby for a flight that was scheduled to leave two hours and ten minutes before my original flight. I got a seat, and while I was annoyed at having to gate-check my bag, I figured at least I'd get home faster and not inconvenience my family quite so much, right?

DING DONG I WAS WRONG. It started to thunder and lightning. They made us wait on the plane. It lightninged some more. We waited some more. Then the captain came on the PA to announce that the crew had timed out because of the delays, and we'd all have to deplane while they got a new crew. This is where I started quietly losing my mind. This flight clearly wasn't going to beat my original flight to New York, and just to add insult to injury, my suitcase with my unicorn Nancy dress was sitting in the belly of the plane, so I couldn't just switch back to my first flight. 

As anyone who has ever flown knows, boarding/deplaning takes a RIDICULOUS amount of time. So I did what all angry millennials do, and took it to the streets, by which I mean Twitter. American Airlines gave me anodyne replies, but what really irked me was that they wouldn't answer my question about why we had to deplane! My suspicion was that they made us get off the plane so that they wouldn't have to compensate the passengers for sitting on the tarmac if the delays stretched past the government limits. I asked the flight attendant on the plane, and she said that wasn't it. But how hard would it have been for the airline Twitter to explain it?!? I just wanted an explanation to console myself with, since I'm an adult and can't just lay in the terminal and cry like a child could've. Getting an answer from one of the flight attendants went a long way. 

Other things that annoyed me: American doesn't let passengers request upgrades unless you have one of their fancy elite-level frequent flier ratings. I couldn't have gotten an upgrade even if the seats were available! No other airline that I've flown prohibits the plebes from asking for an upgrade. 

Second, I saw people pulling two items out of the overheads when I deplaned, which (as I had to gate-check my carryon as the overheads were full) made me want to Learn Those Jerks How to Act. Shouldn't someone be watching out for that while we board?

Third, they don't give out snacks. Delta still gives out snacks! 

Finally, they had the wrong terminal on their website, so my family went to the terminal listed on the website, then had to walk 20 minutes to where I was waiting fuming. Then we had to cart all my stuff back to the car! 

Verdict: 1/10 do not recommend!

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