My body is like the Thunderdome of liquids and solids. Two states enter, but only one leaves. It’s possible that I got this way from eating superannuated macaroni and cheese at the Denver airport Wolfgang Puck. Maybe I got it from being belligerent at the Missoula airport, where I allowed a toddler to open and subsequently drink from my Nalgene bottle just to drive home the point that his parents were not supervising him. Maybe I have some sort of long-term illness that seized air travel as the perfect opportunity to, you know, kill me. Regardless, I am sick. Vomiting is a best-case event. Tomorrow is Christmas, and there will be no Combat! blog then, either. The day after that, I will be a shriveled husk. Don’t cry for me. I’m already dead.

You know Missoula is a nice town because the airport has an open wireless network. You don’t need to sign up with BoingBoing or whatever. They’re tantalizing you, so they let you update your blog while you suffer. My United Airlines flight 5535 from MSO to DEN is delayed one hour, but I’ll still have half an hour to make my connection in Denver, so I’m good. Or I will spend the night at an airport hotel for my third trip in a row with United Airlines. We’ll be be back tomorrow with a real blog post, maybe. It all depends on United Airlines.

Rep. Steve Daines (R–MT) smiles with the mouth part of the face.

Last week, the House of Representatives approved a bipartisan budget deal between Paul Ryan and Patty Murray, paving the way for Congress to pass its first budget since early 2009. Ezra Klein disagrees, but pundits hailed the compromise as a step back to functional two-party government in Washington. Ryan-Murray passed the house 332 to 94, and Montana’s own Steve Daines was one of the 94 against. In a statement, he said that the budget didn’t cut spending enough, and Congress needed to come up with “real solutions” to its debt problems. “Real solutions” turns out to be a phrase Daines uses consistently to talk about imagined alternatives to an existing piece of legislation. You can read all about it in my latest column for the Missoula Independent. If you don’t like politics but are somehow still reading this, you could also peruse this arts feature about my attitude toward Christmas music. It contains a made-up anecdote involving my mother, for license. Sorry Mom. In addition to all this journalism, I also turned in a 19-page story for Write Club this week, and I did a bunch of commercial work, and I threw up out my nose. It’s the busy season. We’ll be back tomorrow with Friday links.