RETURN OF THE NATIVE

posted by James Reel

    I’m back, and pleased to be here. I’ve never had a vacation I didn’t enjoy, but in the end I’m always happiest at home. (The finale of this vacation wasn’t especially pleasant, though. After getting up around 5 a.m. Florence time, trudging all of five minutes in a light rain to a bus station to catch a ride to the airport, making an effortless two-hour hop to London, working our way through Gatwick with far less security-measure chaos than we’d experinced two weeks earlier, watching three pretty decent movies during the 10-hour British Airways transatlantaic flight, and landing in Dallas-Ft. Worth with the satisfaction that the journey was nearing its unremarkable end and without at any time involving a body-cavity search by over-eager security personnel, then, after all that, bad weather delayed our flight to Tucson more than three hours, and once we finally got back in the air and approached our fair city, we circled for a good 45 minutes waiting for somebody at Tucson International Airport to figure out how to turn the runway lights back on. We wound up being dumped in Phoenix, and caught a ride with another passenger who was renting a car and driving to Tucson immediately. We got home at exactly midnight—more like 9 a.m. the next morning, as far as our bodies knew—although our checked bags didn’t show up until dinnertime the following day.)
    Anyway, I’m still catching up and settling in, so no worthwhile blogging today, insofar as I ever do any worthwhile blogging. While I gather my wits, why don’t you amuse yourself with this classical-music quiz, which is tougher than it initially seems. (Warning: A few of the images display so small that you can only guess at what they are.) I am disappointed to report that I scored only 60 out of a possible 74, although the automated tallyer praised me for my astuteness nonetheless.