My best guess for the arrival of my suitcase is tomorrow morning sometime, given that it’s Sunday & the suitcase hasn’t yet been assigned to a driver.

Having a change of clothes in my carry on was useful, though it’s only one day’s worth, so I’m hoping on an early delivery of clean stuff.

Kevin & Tonya, you’d love the JW Marriott experience at the moment; There is what looks like a sign language interpreters conference happening, so there are people signing away all over the lobbies.
There also seems to be the remnants of a drumming regatta, or whatever the hell one of those is called*, in town as well; It explains the two white guys doing pretty good Polynesian-styled drumming in Indianapolis Airport.

( * a ‘noise control violation’, perhaps? maybe a Bonham or a Watts, or even a McBrain or a Collins? )

I’m currently killing time in the lobby (2nd floor, with the Starbucks, FedEx/Kinkos & Hamster Tube) while waiting for;
(a) my room to be ready. It’s no big deal, as I got here at 11am-ish, so I’m WAY earlier than the standard check-in time
(b) my luggage. I’m here, my carry-on is here, my suitcase made it to Chicago but didn’t make it onto the last leg of the trip. This, I’m told by both the airline & the hotel, happens a lot.

The nice hotel concierge gave me a card for a free coffee at the aforementioned Starbucks, so 20-some fluid ounces of Mocha is working it’s beany wiles upon me.

~~~ time passes ~~~

OK, I now have a room on the 28th floor with a view of the city. Am contemplating a very long shower, and feel quietly pleased that I packed a full change of clothing in my carry-on luggage for just such a contingency.
(I’m also considering, once I’m back home, doing a test-pack to see whether it would have been possible to put all of the essentials into carry-on)

~~~ edited at 4pm-ish ~~~
Apparently the bag just came in when I called, so they’ll send it to my hotel. Probably.

~~~ the 7:30pm edit ~~~

Bag Tag Number(s): IND NZ xxxxxx has arrived and has been scheduled for pickup by the delivery service on Aug 11 at 08:00 PM local time. It will be delivered to the address you provided within approximately 6 hours* of pickup time.

Yay?

Forgot to include a picture of the send-off party of K-T & The Dread Pirate Tamsin, so here it is, in glorious cellphone-camera-o-vision.

Trust me, they’re in there somewhere.

There was an actually funny TSA chap at the American Airlines terminal, putting across “this is what you need to do” in a relaxed ‘shall we all just get this done’ way, which was nice.
Even the guy who did a contact search of my back after the scan-o-tron was polite, and gave me some warning.
My hair sets off the body scanners as an item of unexpected density. Last year, at San Francisco, the scanner flagged the hair-tie specifically, and the place where I’d sewn up my jeans because they’d worn through. This time it was just the whole neck & upper spine.
Oddly, the tiny bits of metal in my knee never set anything off. Too small, maybe?

Roughly 4.5 hours to go until the flight to Chicago.

Sitting in the food court strip mall at the Tom Bradley(?) International terminal at LAX.
The airport wifi … Isn’t, as near as I can tell. Lots of ‘connecting’, but no actual connection. Then again, it doesn’t want any money, so I suppose I’m getting exactly what I’m paying for.

I’m definitely feeling more stressy/anxious on this trip, though its happening in waves. Waiting for the plane in the Gate Lounge at Auckland was bad, though hanging out with Kevin/Tonya/Tamsin before that was fine. Most of the flight was stress-free, if bumpy, except for the last hour or so.
Immigration & Border Control was a long slow wait & a short ‘direct’ interrogation by the CBP lady, who was … professionally polite.
No issues, which is good, but I didn’t get mistaken for being in my 30’s, which is what happened last time. 3:)

I kind of wandered for a bit, and took a long time to figure out that I needed to actually buy some water, as opposed to just thinking about doing so. Drinking that now, & contemplating how to kill a few (6+) hours before the flight to Chicago.
There was a vague plan to go and see Andrei if I was awake enough; Don’t think that’s happening.

In-flight sleeping did happen, sometimes during movies, but I’ve now seen The Croods, Oblivion (the Tom Cruise SF thing), Skyfall, and most of Die Hard 5.
Oh, and a minute of a live-action Detective Conan, which, not being subtitled, did not hold my interest.

found the LAX wifi in the American terminal, thus this post

The current plan is to do the check-in & boarding pass bit, as they couldn’t issue the US passes to me in Auckland, like they did last year, and then probably go on through to the air side.
Currently not hungry, but if there’s no food service places airside I’m in for a long-ass wait. Seems unlikely though.

Last year I did my Holiday 2012 journal posts on LiveJournal & on HoardeNet, and it became something of a pain in the arse to build a travel journal from the two sources. Said travel journal is still not finished.
This year I’m going with a one-stop shop here at CraigBlog, and I’ll just link here from FaceBook/Google+/LiveJournal. We’ll see whether it works any better at getting everything in the one place.