A Suffusion of Yellow

Surprise! I'm in Amarillo!

Well, at least it's a surprise to the people my boss and I came here to see. I personally was not all that surprised, though I was surprised enough to neglect to bring a camera. That wasn't really so much a matter of surprise as it was of the house being very dark and everyone being asleep when I left, and the camera probably being under Katie's bed, full of yet another 872,564,931 MySpace vanity shots.

My boss picked me up at the office at 6 this morning, and we flew Southwest to Amarillo via Dallas-Love Field. I'm not as afraid of flying as I used to be, for a few years, but am still deeply distressed by turbulence, which I'm pretty sure is caused by malevolent airborne demons who grab the plane by its wings and bounce it up and down. I was sitting next to my boss, at that, so I had to act calm: never let them see the whites of your knuckles.

The sky seems unnecessarily large here, but at least it's nice and cool - and it's a dry cool, too. The geography is interesting. Our mapping group at work depicts the Amarillo area as dotted all over with small, ovoid lakes - or ponds - or puddles might be a better word. But from an aerial you just see that the ground has lots of strange little wet depressions. What's up with that?

The best part of the trip so far was flying over Palo Duro Canyon, which rips through the otherwise featureless landscape just to the east as if some monstrous creature had clawed the smooth flat earth open. Also, I think I might have recognized, from the air, a couple of towns with highways whose designations I worked on. So I guess I know the area better than I realized. Or else it's just that, if I worked on highways in two towns in the vicinity of Amarillo, and I saw two towns in the vicinity of Amarillo out my airplane window, the statistical likelihood of it being the same two towns is pretty darn high. There isn't a lot out here.

There is, however, a hotel with actual working free wi-fi (remind me to post a good review of the Ambassador; it seems to have gotten some bad rap lately) and a steakhouse. Huzzah!

Ooh, and the bed is nice and soft and amply bedecked with pillows. Thank God. I was up before asses even had cracks.