(dc -> sfo) ABS via chicago

i missed my flight this morning and ended up on the next flight to chicago sitting next to one of mike griffin's senior staff. we chatted about sudoku and i ate pumpkin seeds.

the night before the trip i had a lot to carry home from work in preparation for my long trip. i'd grabbed my bagful of overripe farm fresh yellow cherry tomatoes (yum) and stuck them gingerly in my purse/bag so i could have them the next day for breakfast before my flight. sometime during the night as i was packing i remembered them and transferred them to the fridge. the next day i forgot them in the fridge.

so this (very) senior nasa person and i were chatting away and decided to have lunch during our layovers in chicago. i'd been sitting with my purse in my lap on the plane and noticed that i must have spilled my water on the plane or something because my purse was a bit wet as i was getting off the plane.

when we got off the plane, we wandered to check where our connecting gates were. he took a bit longer than i did, so i decided to investigate the bottom of my bag. it looked like the moisture was coming from inside and i remembered that i'd had a bottle of cough syrup in there at some point. yuck, i thought. and besides, why didn't they take that away from me? this was the very day of the new london-bombing-no-gel-or-liquids-onboard-planes scare. but wait. the cough syrup was closed up just fine. no leakage.....

what's this?

i felt some textured slime in the bottom of my purse and quickly pulled my hand out to find it covered in pulverized half-rotten yellow tomato goo. just at that moment, mr. senior nasa person walks back up to me to shake my hand because it turns out he's got to make his way over to a different terminal and doesn't have time for lunch.

sigh. would you like some pulverized half-rotten yellow tomato goo, mr. senior nasa person?

i shook his hand with my other hand. good thing we have two and good thing i'd decided to explore the nether regions of my purse with my left. i went into the bathroom and pulled out several pulverized tomatoes, and a few that were still intact. i ate those. i was hungry. they don't feed you on planes anymore.