Sitting at the counter, having an encounter...

I'm blogging from LaGuardia airport, waiting for the day's one nonstop flight from NYC to Madison. This morning, I tossed my bags in a cab and made it uptown to the Metropolitan Museum where I took a hundred photographs and then got in line at the restaurant to order up my one meal of the day.

I got to jump the line by agreeing to take a seat at the counter. I was going to write some notes for my Tuesday column, but the woman on the next stool struck up a conversation. It turns out she's an artist, Lynn Pulsifer. Check out her awesome pastels:



She leaves. I do my notes. I drink a lot of black coffee, then collect my things to go. Working my way to the exit, I go in an exhibit the back way. Wow! What is this? I'm blown away! It's "Glitter and Doom: German Portraits from the 1920s." No photos from me. You can't do photography at a current exhibition, which is an acceptable rule. It would have been annoying. The show was really crowded. (Tomorrow's the last day.)

Here are some images on the Met's website. I especially loved Otto Dix:



The intense caricatures sealed themselves onto my retinas so that when I started looking around at the people in the gallery, they seemed all to have the look of the decadent Germans in the pictures.

I absolutely must buy the catalogue:



High on art, manic, I traipse through the museum store and find myself spending $300 on two scarves. The chartreuse one with photo-realistic, pop art flowers called out to me. Then another, pale gold and dripping with glass beads, cried that it needed me too.

Now, I'm at the airport. There's WiFi. I'm not manic anymore, but I feel great. Soon I'll be on the plane. Deprived of access, I'm going to type out two or three column ideas I have and see which one tells me it wants to be the Tuesday.

ARGGHHH: It's quarter to 10 and I'm still at the airport. Yes, the flight is non-stop, but so far it's also been non-start. I'm just glad there's been WiFi, electrical outlets, and consistent reason to believe that we will make it home tonight.

MORE: We were waiting for a plane and a crew that needed to go through the Cleveland airport, where this happened:

A commuter plane carrying more than 70 people ran off the end of a snowy runway and pierced a fence after landing at the Cleveland airport Sunday, officials said. No injuries were reported.

The plane came to a stop more than 150 feet past the end of the runway, said Thonnia Lee, a spokeswoman for Delta Air Lines Inc. The engines were partially buried in snow and the tip of the plane's nose was resting on a roadway the airport uses to get to perimeter buildings...

The airport was closed for about an hour and a half and some planes were diverted to other cities....