Category: Strange World

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Stranded travelers leaving LAX on foot down a closed Century Blvd.

I work in an office building across the street from Los Angeles’ main airport, LAX. This morning was….interesting.

I was driving to work as usual, and noticed two things:

  1. Just past the next intersection, the street was completely full of stopped cars.
  2. At least five helicopters were hovering in place up ahead.

This is the third time in as many months that I’ve seen helicopters just holding position like that near the airport. Once the choppers were keeping an eye on a damaged airplane making an emergency landing. Once was the ex-TSA agent bomb scare on September 11.

I turned onto a side street and took a back way to the parking structure. The drone of helicopters was stronger when I got out of the car, and police car after police car started racing down the left side of the street, sirens blaring.

The building concierge hadn’t heard what was going on. She just shrugged and said, “L.A.”

Once I got into the office I found out what was going on: There had been a shooting at the airport, an incident still ongoing. There were still airplanes taking off at the time, though we hadn’t noticed anyone landing, and more and more helicopters took up position in the sky down the street.

Information was still spotty at the time, so I sat down to work, but it’s unnerving to listen to the constant drone of helicopters when you know they’re there because something’s wrong, especially when that sound is punctuated every few minutes by yet another siren.

By lunchtime, Century Blvd. had been blocked off by police and the trapped cars had been cleared out, leaving the street eerily empty. A stream of stranded travelers trudged along the sidewalk and in lanes, dragging their luggage away from the airport and toward hotels, offsite parking, or transportation. The cafe downstairs was swamped (though not as full as I’ve seen it during conventions).

What surprised me were the people getting out of cars at the curb just outside of the barricaded area, pulling their suitcases with them and starting the mile-long trek toward the airport. I can only assume they were counting on delays being lifted by the end of the day and their flights actually taking off. Though I’m not sure what the people waiting at the bus stop inside the closed area were planning to do.

It’s about two in the afternoon right now. I’m pretty sure I heard an airplane take off a few minutes ago. Most of the helicopters are gone, and while the street still looks closed, I can see more people walking toward the airport than away from it. It looks like things may be starting to return to normal.

Update 6:00pm: Century Blvd has been re-opened for traffic (though I wouldn’t say it’s moving, and airplanes are taking off again. If you look closely in the picture below, though, you can just see some helicopters still holding position above the airport.

Backed up traffic at sunset

On a completely different note: I’ve decided to try NaBloPoMo and post every day this month. I’ve been getting all the NaNoWriMo emails, and while I don’t have the time or story ideas (and Katie’s covering the “writing a novel” thing), I’m a little nostalgic for a writing challenge.

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Wow. A study finds that only 54% of patients experiencing an anaphylactic episode requiring an ER visit or hospitalization get an epinephrine prescription within a year, and only 22% visit an allergist or immunologist in that time. (via this week’s FARE newsletter)

The article treats this as an education/compliance issue, but I have two big questions:

  1. How many of these patients discussed the incident with their regular doctor? It’s possible that more than 22% followed up with a doctor, just not with a specialist.
  2. How does insurance coverage correlate? If you don’t have insurance, it’s expensive to see a specialist, and expensive to get an Epi-pen (though there are generics now that are a bit cheaper)…especially after you’ve just received a bill for thousands of dollars for the emergency room.

Regarding #2, the study looked at “healthcare claims,” so if I’m reading that correctly, they may have only looked at people who do have insurance. If that’s the case, I wonder if it would be possible to break it down by type of insurance: HMO vs. PPO, do they charge a higher co-pay for specialists, etc. Our current system could do a lot more to encourage preventative care.

For the record: The first thing I did when I got home from that San Diego trip was to order a replacement Epi-Pen, and Monday morning, I called up my allergist to schedule an appointment. But then, I already had an allergist, a prescription, and insurance.

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Buildings reflecting the setting sun Reflected sunset in the lobby

Monday afternoon I noticed the sun was still shining into my office window. This was a bit odd since my window looks out at another building, and the sun had already sunk behind it.

I looked, and it was reflecting off the building I was in, then reflecting off the building across the way.

Later that evening, I stepped out of the elevator to the sight of sunlight streaming into the lobby from the east.

Wait, east? At sunset?

You guessed it. Once again, it was reflecting off another building.

This part of Los Angeles is built on a North/South and East/West grid, and with the autumnal equinox approaching, it’s lining up just about perfectly with the shiny reflective buildings.

It also aligns perfectly with the mirrors in my car when I’m driving east at sunset. The triple sun is almost worse than driving straight at it.

It’s no Manhattanhenge, but it’s still interesting. One of these days I’ll look up the grid alignment for downtown LA (it’s diagonal) and try to recapture a moment from a few years ago, when I was in exactly the right spot for the sunset to light up all the towers bright orange. That was awesome

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You’ve got to love this headline: Giant goat-cheese fire closes Norwegian roadway for six days. Apparently, brunost burns really well, and when a truck carrying it caught fire in a tunnel, responders were unable to get to it for days.

(Incidentally, the stuff is also really good. My family discovered it on a vacation to Disney World, of all places, where they served it in the smorgasbord at the Norwegian restaurant in Epcot.)

This is even weirder than the truck full of meat that caught fire on the 5 near Camp Pendleton a few years back, blocking the entire freeway in an area with no alternate routes for most of the day and stranding all of the Orange County & Los Angeles people trying to get to the first day of Comic-Con.

I’m going to have to start using “flaming goat cheese on a truck!” as a pseudo-curse.

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When my son was younger, I longed for the day when he’d be able to talk, just so it wouldn’t be a guessing game every time he wanted something. Now that he can tell us whether he’s hungry, thirsty, wants to play ball or take a bath, wants something specific to eat, etc., it’s a lot easier to respond (even if it’s to tell him that no, he can’t have any pie because he refused to eat dinner).

Most of the time.

There are still a lot of things he understands but can’t say, so he tries to get the idea across some other way. Instead of 20 questions, it becomes a riddle game.

As an example: Last night he kept saying “pee.” This variously means “piece” (either as an observation or a request), “please” (though he usually signs that still), or, well, pee. After ruling out the obvious, we couldn’t figure out what he was trying to ask for or comment on until I realized he was always saying it while pointing at, looking at, or touching my desk, where I had set a roll of tape that I’d let him play with pieces of the other day…and made the connection with the other random comment he’d been pulling out every few minutes: pointing to a half-healed scrape on his foot from last week and saying “Ow.”

He wanted a new band-aid for the scrape: A piece of something like the tape on my desk for the owie on his foot.

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