I'm leaving for a short (2-day) business trip to Las Vegas. I have an evening flight, but She Who Puts Up With Me is in the Holidazzle parade tonight, so she left with the kids around 4 PM. There wasn't much point staying home, so I'm hanging out in the Northwest Worldclub, taking advantage of the free coffee and WiFi until my flight leaves. I'm going to be pretty high on caffeine by the time my flight leaves, so take these random thoughts with that in mind:

* In Minnesota, we've got plenty of cold in the winter, and plenty of hot in the summer. What we need is a way to store the former for the latter, and the latter for the former.

* Business travel tip: If you're flying somewhere warm, leave your jacket at home, even in the middle of winter. You only need it for the 30 seconds it takes to get from your car to the parking ramp elevator, and nobody freezes to death in 30 seconds. Not even here.

* It is very difficult to fly to anywhere from Minneapolis on an airline which is not bankrupt. Food for thought.

* If you don't like to gamble and you don't want to have sex with someone not your wife, a business trip to Las Vegas might as well be a trip to Phoenix. Except, of course, that there's always someone in the group who wants to gamble or go to a bar.

* I forgot my cellphone charger. I've got enough juice for the two-day trip, but E-mail might be a more reliable way to reach me.

* On the tram in the airport, there was a guy sitting there eating a food court Chinese dinner and riding the tram back and forth. The smell of Kung-Fu Chicken (or whatever the heck it was) was like a physical force, pushing me out of the train as soon as the doors opened.

* We've been having almost nonstop snow flurries for the past week, and it's supposed to be below zero tonight. Brrr. It went straight from October weather to January, with no stops in between. After a week, the flurries finally added up to enough snow to bother shoveling off the driveway. Last year we didn't get shovelable snow until January.

* Some people clean the snow off their driveways every time there's the tiniest dusting of snow. Some of them actually polish the driveway clean. I don't get this. I always wait until the undercarriage of the car drags in the snowdrifts.

* We got new tires for our trusty minivan at Costco yesterday. It took them almost three hours, during which time we were stuck there. As a result, we wound up spending more than we planned on groceries this week. I'm sure this was part of some larger plan.

* There's only so much of Northwest Airlines coffee I can stand. Bleah.

* Our stove installation has been re-scheduled for this coming Friday. This is almost the worst-case scenario (back to the end of the line for an appointment) after their screw-up last week. Unfortunately, it would have been really handy to have wood heat during the current cold snap, and last Monday was the last warm day in sight for a while.