Woke up at the Westin in the Detroit airport and found the bill that had been slipped under my door on the way to the bathroom. I wasn't getting any cell reception in my room so I made a brief local phone call the night before. For which I was charged $8.50. Had an omelet in the hotel restaurant. Not too bad. Boarded my flight to find a Bible sitting on my seat along with a copy of When Godly People Do Ungodly Things: Arming Yourself in the Age of Seduction. The Good Book and the silly book both belonged to the woman talking into her cell phone in the next seat. Which was fine. I don't mind sharing airplanes with Christians—hell, I cross myself, Catholic-style, before I board an airplane and when I get off. As far as I'm concerned, a Christian on an airplane is a good luck charm.

But this Christian, well, she yapped loudly on the phone until the last possible moment, and then, when she had to turn off her phone, she pulled out a huge, black nail file and began filing her nails. Scratch, scritch, scratch. It was weirdly loud. The guy in the next seat over made eye contact with me and rolled his eyes. The blanket on her lap—which someone else would be using later (and using a blanket or a pillow on airplane is about as advisable as using a communal toothbrush)—was quickly covered in little white specks of filed-off, ground-up fingernail. She also used the file to get stuff out from under her fingernails. Soon little bits of her nails were landing on my lap. This all struck me as ungodly rude. Now I know that posting pictures of strangers doing stupid shit on airplanes is rude—this I know for the Sloggers tell me so—but I'm only doing unto this woman as she has done onto me.

Ungodly.

Walking through the airport on the way to baggage claim—and there isn't a baggage carousel on earth big enough to accommodate all of my baggage—I walked by a store that sells nothing but sterling silver and was momentarily struck dumb by this:

I stood there gaping for a moment—gaping at this huge silver puma or leopard or whatever it is, easily the size of a toddler—and the sales clerk came running up to me. She asked me if I liked it, and I pretended that I did, and then she told that right now, today, I could take this tasteful little tchotchke home for 20% off its $5,495 asking price. I couldn't decide if the fact that there are $5,495 knickknacks for sale at the Indianapolis airport meant that the recession hadn't hit Indiana yet or if the fact that they're marking the 5K tchotchkes down—down to a much more reasonable $4,396—means that the recession is hitting Indiana... but not nearly hard enough.

I asked if I could take a picture to show my husband-in-Canada/boyfriend-in-America—I would need his okay before making such a large purchase—and she said okay. So, Terry, what do you think?

My morning ended—literally, as this happened at 11:59—when I sat on a couch in the new terminal at Indianapolis's very swanky airport to download my email. I noticed a large dog coming my way. I don't like dogs. But this was working dog, a bag-sniffing dog, that was attached, by a leash, to a very large, very serious looking law-enforcement ossifer. I didn't know what to do. I didn't want to jump and run, as that would look suspicious, but I didn't really want the dog to sniff my bag either. It had to be a bomb-sniffing dog, I figured, and I didn't have a bomb in my bag—I almost never do—but I did have something in my bag that other dogs, and perhaps this dog in a previous career, have been trained to sniff out.

The sniffer dog sniffered my shoes and my backpack. I don't think the dog lingered over my bag for very long. But it felt like eternity.

So how's your morning going?