House 12

I was a bit surprised to find the vast amount of comments left on my last entry. As dunqn would no doubt say, I thought the whole thing quite hilarious.

Regardless of whether anyone finds it disturbing or not, here I am in America again. The flight wasn't the best I've been on - after about half an hour sitting on the plane in Holland waiting for it to take off, the pilot announced happily that there was a fuel leak. He then decided to tell us that it hadn't been from the plane but from the refueling truck. When the plane eventually took off, he wasn't even sure that we would be able to land in JFK because of the snow.

In fact, the plane was meant to be a 777 (TV screens in the backs of the chairs in front of you) but because of the weather it was changed to a 747 (your legs squashed up against the back of the chairs in front of you). For the first time ever, the film was one that I actually wanted to watch - Sky Captain - but I didn't pay much attention to it because the cries of "We're losing altitude!" while the plane was being buffeted around over the Atlantic weren't very comforting.

I had an exit row and all the legroom I could ever need, but the exit started whistling about two hours from the end of the flight. After a couple of air-hostesses came past looking worried, I was offered some horrendous yellow earplugs, but declined them.

After circling round for a while, we eventually landed, and a couple more hours were spent waiting in queues at immigration, luggage collection and customs. Thanks to the heroism of Alex and Tenaya I was driven back to House 12, where two weeks of being with whinknee, freedom from work and lack of hall fire alarms awaited.

So, we had a fire alarm last night. The noise of the siren is far better than the one in AMH, it's not so much a wailing cloud of noise and more like the sound of someone chainsawing through the wall. Apparently it was also the first fire alarm that had happened in the building since the beginning of the year in September, so it was nice of them to wait for me before setting it off.