Category: travel

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houston reminds me of florida

Y'all come back now, y'hear?
Houston reminds me of Florida. The landscape and the weather are Florida all the way. I’m staying in some “executive” suites place where the room is more like a little apartment than a hotel room. I’ve got a kitchen, fridge, etc. At least they have free broadband, that’s cool. Tomorrow’s my presentation – I’m ready and just want to get it through with. Then it’s another six hours of flying and I’m back in time to go to bed. Yeah.

I don’t know what it is about this room, but it makes me feel lonely. I think because it’s kind of like a little living quarters, it makes me miss Sharaun. It seems too long-term or something, glad I’m only here for one night. I shouldn’t be tired, since I slept on both legs of the flight out here this morning, but for some reason I’m sleepy right now. It’s nearly midnight Houston time, so I guess that’s a good thing since I have to be up early tomorrow. I should probably turn in and get some rest, I plan to be up early to run through my presentation one last time.

I like being up high. My room is on the fourth floor. Even when I was an apartment-dweller in college, I always wanted a place above the ground floor. To me it provides an element of safety, and I also think it’s neat to be able to “look out” over things. I’m sitting here looking at a pair of golden arches through the fog, kinda nice. I used to love the 5th floor condo we had when we first moved to Florida. Frank and I would sit out on the balcony and watch the birds dive into the waves to catch fish. Sometimes I’d look at the ships that were just dots on the horizon and wonder who was on them. High places are good thinkin’ places. Maybe that’s why gurus in cartoons are always on top of mountains. Hmmm…

Goodnight all. I did my best to come up with three paragraphs. I guess I’ve kinda stopped pre-writing blogs way ahead of time. Now it seems I mostly write day-to-day, which most likely makes these entries less and less exciting to read. I’ve got plenty of stories left, and lots of ideas to write – I guess I’ve just been busy lately. I’ll try and step it up a notch so I don’t lose my entire audience. Until then, keep reading and I’ll keep writing.

From Texas, Dave out.

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daytime tv

I stand by a tank or something with a missle..
Monday and I’ll be in the air all day. With a horrendous combination of layovers and air-time I’ll end up in Houston about six hours after I leave Sacramento. Speeding my way through the clouds to the lone star state, I’ll be there for a couple days before returning home. Not exactly what I wanted to do with my week, but then again I’m not making that decision. On a positive note, I feel a lot better about my presentation. I shook some of my blahs and knuckled down to learn the material. I feel I’m about as prepared as I can be, which is good.

This weekend was good. Laziness, flying-for-leisure with pilot Ben, lots of cleaning and Christmas-taking-downing, and just hanging out. I did manage to reorganize the garage and do some fanatical shower cleaning. I find myself doing older and older things all the time. I mean, I woke up early on Sunday and cooked breakfast for Sharaun and I. Not really that strange except it just hammered home how domesticated I am. After that I cleaned the garage and waved “hello” to neighbors as they drove down my street. Yikes.

Now it’s Sunday night (yeah, I’m not gonna lie to ya) and I’m all packed up and ready to go. Just got back from a nice meal and Alias episode at Kristi’s place, which has me properly satiated and primed for some sleep. But instead I’m sitting here contemplating watching the second disc of the Two Towers dvd set? nah? bad idea. Spell-checking that paragraph above led me to find yet another word that ruins that dumb “i before e” rule. “Leisure” doesn’t fit at all. And I’m still mad that “won’t” is a contraction of “will not” (where’d the ‘o’ come from?), and “fiery” doesn’t have “fire” in it. Foreigners: give up, it’s too hard. (Check it out, “foreign” wrecks it too.) Ugh.

The other day my long-lost and recently-found friend from 5th grade, Shaine, asked me if I’d make him copies of each album on my top-ten of 2003 list. Oh man, that’s like a dream come true for me. Not only did I make ’em, I threw in a few extras and even wrote a little paragraph about each album explaining why I like it that much. When you indulge my musiclust, you get more than you bargained for. So if you’re reading and you wanna hear what tops to me, drop me a line and I’ll be happy to oblige you with copies.

The other day I was at home for lunch, eating leftovers and marveling again about the “theme” in daytime TV advertising – COPS to be specific. It’s abundantly clear that there’s a target audience in mind here. There are a few basic groups that these adverts can be broken down into, and it’s extremely rare to see a commercial that doesn’t somehow fit. We have the “I’m in financial/personal trouble” group: bail bonds, hold-check-for-cash places, buy-out your settlement places, dirt-cheap car insurance, and car loans and cell phones for those with negative credit ratings, etc.. We have the “I want to better myself” group: no-name colleges, medical coding, high-tech degree in 6mos, truck driver school, the Hollywood Diet, etc. Then there’s the “I want to sue” group: motorcycle attorneys, personal injury attorneys, asbestos attorneys, divorce attorneys, on and on and on. It’s depressing to see who’s sitting at home watching TV during the day.

OK guys, it’s getting near midnight and when I can legally post this entry as “Monday.” Until tomorrow, Dave out.

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legions of evil conspiring

Ho ho ho!
Merry Christmas y’all! Despite the legions of evil seemingly joining forces to conspire against us, we are now at cruising altitude on our last leg of the journey to FL. Evil you say? Oh yes, evil – listen up and I’ll rap it to ya.

In order to save a little dough on long-term parking at the airport, we set up a “carpool” thing withSteve & Ragan. We took them to the airport around 5pm, dropped them off, and left them with my set of keys. Since they get back before us, they’ll get the car, and then come and pick us up when we return. That way we get to split the cost of parking between the two of us. All went as planned, and Sharaun and I returned home to finish up packing and readying for the trip. Our flight was set to leave at 10:30pm, so we planned on leaving the house around 8:30.

As we were getting ready to leave, I was burning a dvd of all our latest photos so we could show her family, and Sharaun needed to get her backpack out of her trunk. She got her set of keys from me, and went into the garage. A few minutes later she came back to me and asked me for the keys again. When I told her that she still had them from before, she said something like “oh crap.” Turns out she had locked her set of keys, the only set of keys we had since we gave mine to Steve & Ragan, in the trunk of her car. As we panicked and I tried to jimmy the lock with a coat hanger, Sharaun also realized that her ID was locked in the car. So, even if we could manage to get to the airport somehow, we wouldn’t be able to board the flight. By now it’s 8pm, and we’re supposed to be leaving in half an hour. Sharaun got on the phone with AAA and they said they could have someone there in 45min or loss – it would be cutting it close, but it was the best we could do. Thankfully, the AAA guy arrived in a mere 10min. The car was unlocked and we were on the road by 8:38pm. A bad situation narrowly averted, but that’s just the beginning. (As a sidenote, this is at least the 3rd time I know of that Sharaun has had to call AAA because she’s locked her keys in her car. She usually doesn’t mention it to me out of embarrassment, but at least were getting our money’s worth out of ’em.)

Once at the airport, we discovered that the day’s earlier flight to Atlanta (our connection on the way to Orlando) had been cancelled, and there were people that had been waiting nearly 10hrs for the next flight – out flight. Needless to say, that plane was completely overbooked, and Sharaun and I didn’t get to sit together. Upon getting on the plane, I walked down the aisle looking for my appointed seat with fingers crossed. When I saw the hulking whale of a woman who would be overflowing into my seat for the next three and a half hours, I knew it was gonna be lovely. This beast of a lady made it impossible to sit in a normal fashion, instead I folded my body like origami and sandwiched myself between her mass and the window. Did I mention she smelled like shellac? No? Well maybe that’s because she didn’t really, in fact, I don’t even know what shellac smells like – I just really like that word and think it would be funny to describe someone as “smelling like shellac.” Anyway, her breath was bad, and each yawn sent a toxic blast my way.

So, here I am cowering beneath this side-show lady – and the captain comes on to inform us that the “auxiliary power unit” on our aircraft is not working. This means we have no air circulation while the engines aren’t running. This means it’s hot as crap on this plane as we sit for what seems like an hour. I might as well have worn my trunks, because my balls were swimming. The plane finally gets underway, about 50min late. What a coincidence, we have a 50min layover in Atlanta that has just been negated. As we take off, I realize that there are about 700 babies on this flight, and the two kids in front of me aren’t going to get along at all. Ugh, I bend my neck like a contortionist, look down the aisle to where Sharaun’s sitting, and do my best to ignore it all. Just as we climb into the air, the captain comes on again to let us know that this will be a particularly turbulent flight. Grand.

We finally arrive in Atlanta, and we have about 15min to make our connection. Once again our situation is looking iffy, but once again things work out. They end up holding the plane to Orlando, since so many from our flight are trying to make that connection. We do a speed-walk to the terminal, and once again aren’t sitting together. And that brings us to the present: I sit on the plane and wait to get to Orlando. At least we made it.

The girl in front of me is reading a US Weekly magazine. The actual printed headline on the cover of the magazine reads: “Jennifer Aniston’s Hot New Haircut.” Holy crap. That’s the lead story in this magazine? I can’t even fathom what other stories might be in there. Who the crap cares about Jennifer Anniston’s haircut? I wonder if each time she cuts her hair she gets a headline? That could make you have a big head. People are insane. A real headline would be “Jennifer Aniston loses head in lion fight,” or something a little more interesting. Maybe then I’d buy it.

Dave out.