dispatch from the crystal city hilton

I am currently sitting in my hotel room in Crystal City, VA (right near the Washington Reagan airport). I am here for a talk on survey attrition that I was supposed to give tomorrow; this is the talk for which I spent all day Monday prepared several million handsome Stata and Excel graphs.

The conference, however, has now been cancelled, as the entire Washington, DC area appears to be closing down and boarding up in preparations for this hurricane. Moreover, my flight tomorrow night has been cancelled as well. I learned that it had been cancelled when I called to try to get on an early flight anyway since I have nothing to do tomorrow (all the DC museums, etc, apparently will also be closed, and word is that the Metro is going to shut down at 11am). I was told that absolutely every seat on every morning flight out of here is booked, but I was able to get on a 2pm flight, which should precede the arrival of the Isabel-apocalypse. My worry is that my flight will end up being delayed and then cancelled and then I'll end up getting stuck here until Saturday. I am supposed to be going to Iowa City this weekend to see my beloved Hawkeyes play, and if I end up missing that I will be inconsolable.

Anyway, enough whining. I do have a high-speed Internet connection and have posted a blog entry now from my third state (Wisconsin, Georgia, and now Virginia). Maybe I will make it a goal to blog from every state. Which would be a pretty lofty goal for me, considering I think there are at least twenty states that I haven't yet set foot in anytime in my first thirty-two years.