Matt Holthe's Fleeting Thoughts

I've been keeping track of how many states and how many airports I've visited since starting my current job several years ago. My definition of "visiting a state" is two-fold. There are states where I've stepped foot in (being at the airport is good enough) and states where I've spent the night in. This week, I added the Seattle Airport (SEA) for my first official time setting foot in the state of Washington. And I'll be spending the night here before flying home tomorrow. So I've now been to 43 out of 50 states. I'm missing Alaska (pretty typical), New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine (I could get all of those in 1 trip), North Dakota, Oregon, and (believe it or not) South Carolina. I could imagine getting a trip to Oregon at some point in the future of this job. The other states, it's most likely going to take a side trip or concerted effort to get there.

Oh, my... this was a horrible travel week. I was scheduled to fly Bloomington (BMI) to Chicago (ORD) to Pittsburgh (PIT) to Tuesday, then PIT to ORD on Wednesday and ORD to BMI on Thursday morning. (I couldn't get all the way back to BMI Wednesday because of flight timings). Tuesday morning I get an automated call that my 10AM BMI-ORD flight was canceled (which means I would miss my ORD-PIT flight). I was rescheduled on the 5PM BMI-ORD flight and 9:30PM ORD-PIT flight. So that's 1 cancel and 1 missed flight. Around noon, I got another call that my 5PM BMI-ORD flight was canceled. Since it was noon, I decided just to rent a one-way car and drive up to Chicago (about 3 hours) to catch my ORD-PIT flight. Turns out the ORD-PIT flight was delayed for various reasons for 2 1/2 hours. We took off at midnight. I finally got to the hotel and my head hit the pillow at 3:45 AM local time. 2 cancels and 1 missed flight and 1 delayed flight isn't horrible, but that was only the ou...

Again this year I picked the line and total on every NCAA tournament game. Tonight's the championship game, so there's been 132 picks (66 lines and 66 totals) so far. U-G-L-Y is the only word for it. I went 29-37 on the lines (43.9%) and the exact same on the totals. For the line bets, I seemed to do a little bit better picking the underdog (16-17) compared to picking the favorite (13-20).