In the Southwest

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I arrived into Las Vegas last night, via Allegiant Air. It was the first time I'd flown that low-cost carrier, as they started offering flights from Cedar Rapids, Des Moines, Sioux Falls and Madison to Vegas this year. I'd fly them again. The planes were new and clean, all the seats were leather, and there was a lot more leg room than on my Lufthansa flight to Europe. If you're going to/from Vegas, check their site for pricing, as they don't seem to show up on Orbitz/Expedia/Travelocity. Their web site design rather sucks, but the price was right. I woke up before everyone else this morning and was pleasantly surprised to find that MSN has a local dial-up number for Sandy Valley, the small town outside of Las Vegas where my parents' house is. I knew AOL had put in a local number here last year, but I use MSN when I travel, and I didn't feel like waking up mom and dad to get their password for their AOL account. The phone lines out here in the sticks only will let me connect at 28.8, but at least I don't have to pay long distance any more...

Christmas Family Tree

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Since I'm going to be stuck hanging out with relatives during the Holidays, I decided it was a good time to start work on my family tree. It's a project I've wanted to do for a few years, and I finally found a piece of software that seemed worth the price and reasonably feature complete. I selected Heredis, which also has a Windows version, since it can output an HTML version of all of the data. I'm not going through this much work to keep it to myself, this is going online where the all-seeing Eye of Google can index it and save someone else the work later. That said, I've got the first of hundreds of drafts to come on my site now, created mostly from memory, some tombstones I could find online, and some of the work that my Great-Uncle Reimert has done.

Is expediting your passport application worth it?

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Before I went to Russia, I had to get my passport. I paid the extra money for expedited service, as well as shipping the application and the passport overnight both ways. It came to about $180, but I had my passport back 8 days from when I sent it in during the month of June. My wife applied for a passport two weeks ago, as we're thinking of traveling abroad in the coming year. No particular hurry, so we just paid the normal $80 charge and sent it first class mail, no rush service on the passport either.

Her passport came in 9 days.

I guess they saw me coming, it cost me an extra hundred dollars to get my passport a day sooner. At least work paid for it...