There was one flight back to Toronto that day, and we missed it. They were going to reroute us through Dallas-Chicago-SomewhereElse-Toronto. And as I said: different terminals and airlines with half-hour landing/takeoff times. But we could have made it to Dallas and then caught their Toronto flight, since we checked in three hours early.
And thus, we shall never fly that airline again or return to Waco.
OK…I just caught up on today’s posts and will comment later because I need to work on the next installment, which I’d like to get to in a little while. Sadly, I’m unable to post from my place of employment (not that I’d have time if I could; I have the opposite problem of taxi and susan: perpetual list of things I haven’t done yet. I had a couple of interviews, follow-up scoring comments etc, a request for proposals to do final comments on (I was the last one to comment and there were a couple of fatal flaws), a couple of items where data needed to be verified, and several other items I don’t remember including the usual harrassment of several of my employees. 
We tease each other a lot and I was gone for more than two weeks, so I needed to catch up.
Anyway…I seem to have enough energy to get some stuff done, so I’m off to refine part III.
GT
For this next part, you need to understand my history of seatmates. On the Atlanta-Stuttgart flight, I sat next to a COMPLETELY silent German intellectual type who never – NOT ONCE – got up during the whole flight. So maybe he didn’t say anything cuz he was shy and wasn’t sure if I spoke German (I do), but he didn’t strike me as that type. Or, then there are all the times that I didn’t have a neighbor. Does anyone else take that personally? I always have this momentary feeling that I’m not good enough to have someone sit next to me if the seat is empty.
So this very nice, just slightly scruffy-looking French guy is suddenly standing in front of me, indicating that he’s my neighbor. I get up and he starts to speak. In French. Which, while a lovely language, is not one I speak. It really freaks me out to have someone open his mouth and have words come out that I recognize as being a specific language, but don’t understand. Do other multilingual people have this problem? It seems like I should always understand people speaking different languages, but I just don’t. Also, regardless of the non-understood language, I want to respond in German. In fact, German is apparently spoken in all of Great Britain. When I went to change money in London once, I wanted very badly to reply to the teller in German.
Anyhow, at that moment, I really regretted not having gone back to learn French. I’ve wanted to learn French since I was 5, but got sidetracked by German.
So you wanted to know more about this guy, right? Well, fortunately, he spoke English, so he was able to turn the bla bla bla into: “Would you prefer to sit by the window?” (I was sitting by the aisle.) My witty reply was something like “No thanks, I hate feeling like I have to climb over someone to get up and walk.” He laughed. (Isn’t it sexy when someone thinks the perfectly stupid thing you just said is funny?) Then we had a romantic discussion about the space between the rows. He’s tall (somewhere over 6 feet) and his knees were awfully close to the row ahead of us. Since he seemed so kind, I volunteered to switch places so that he’d have a chance of stretching out into the aisle. (This took a lot of internal debate. I really HATE HATE HATE sitting by the window on long flights.) He politely declined and said he was really tired and would probably sleep most of the flight, but maybe later. He had a really nice voice, soft and polite and sincere and masculine all at the same time. I was in love and he was planning to sleep most of the flight??!!
So, no, no mile-high club for us (explain to me how people manage to join this club on commercial jets? Have you seen the size of the lavatories? You can barely fit one person into them!). And, no, I didn’t get to rest my head on his shoulder (although I did fall asleep for a while – hope I didn’t snore or drool or anything).
But it was quite entertaining to watch him sleep, as he was able to sleep in a variety of positions I would have thought impossible on a plane. First there was the one that reminded me of my nephew in a carseat as a baby: chin on his chest at what looks like a really painful angle, but 100% dead to the world. Then there were the variations on leaning against the headrest, with pillow, without pillow, and up against the window. The winner was, however, leaning forward with the pillow between the top of his head and the seat in front of him. It was kind of disappointing that he didn’t try leaning on my shoulder. That I’m aware of. Must not be a very deep sleeper, though, because he managed to wake up every time they stopped by with food or drink.
So, I’m sure he thought I was this nice older lady (he was 30ish, I’m late 40s), while I was able to indulge in the daydream of “maybe he’ll be going to Columbus too and we can share a cab and…and…and live happily ever after.”
Eventually, the almost 8 hours were up and we landed and one of our neighbors beaned me with whatever they were getting out of the overhead (it was something small, so no major damage), and I was in such a good mood that I just giggled. And then he offered me some of those French licorice thingies I was talking about last week. Here’s a link for those of you who weren’t following along. And then we deplaned. And now ::sniff:: I miss him.
But wait, there’s more. And yes, you’ll have to wait for the end of the saga. 'Fraid it might be late tomorrow night before the last installment cuz I’m going to the movies after work.
Have a lovely evening and a lovely workday tomorrow. And be kind to someone. They might think it’s a turn-on.
GT
Nope. sorry, but you can’t. You don’t use Big Letters enough, so you are Exempt from MMP OPing.
(ha! i crack me up!)
Anyway, you know what happened at work today? (For me.) I got cat pee on me!
Only the cat didn’t actually pee on me. And I didn’t slop the bowl full of pee on me (there was a Bowl of Urine (band name!) today, as it happens). Nope.
See, there was this one cat. He was in because he might have been stoppered up. (I’m pretty sure he was, as it happens.) But I saw he had a catheter in his little cat arm. Only he got the fluid line all disconnected. This was bad so I grabbed the cat out of his cage and commenced getting the line re-installed. (With a new administration set because the first one was all dirty so we couldn’t use it anymore.)
That went well, and I went to put the cat back in his cage.
This is when I found out the cat was in to be catheterized “down there”.
Oh joy! The whole time I was carrying the cat around the width and length of the Treatment Area he was dripping pee on me out his “other” catheter.
This is how the day started off. (Today was my “Half Day”, so it didn’t start til after lunch.) It didn’t go up much from there.
But I… hmm… I was trying to think of something that went really well today to off-set the whole Cat Pee Thing… nope, not thinking of anything. At least I didn’t get fired.
So there’s that.
Oooh, stopped-up kitties are unhappy kitties (cue Bailey the Expensive WonderKitty theme). Great story. We all love Unca Rue stories.
If you would like more cat pee in your life you may have Aerin. She pees on luggage, mattresses, and plastic bags. She’s free! No charge at all!
I would ask if you were me, but I already know that scout is me. Plus, I haven’t been to France since high school. But other than that, that was my plane flight back from California. Somewhat.
Cute guy in window seat. Me in aisle. He offered me cookies. I had one. 6 hour plane ride. The end of our relationship.
Now I’m thinking of all the missed opportunities in my life. I am so clueless, I don’t even know when I’m being hit on. But for those that I crushed on desparately, I am sorry that you didn’t get to know the wonder that was me…
Susan
Not Only Have I Used Very Large Letters In The Pastas many others can attestI’ve even been known to use assorted colors
nyah
susan I also am oblivious to women flirting with me. I often wonder if I’ve been dismissed as clueless when their obvious-to-everyone-else flirting just doesn’t make a dent. Are there classes one can take to get better in this?
And I have been told that I am a shameless flirt (not just by mika here, but also by my first wife.) But I have no idea that I am doing it.
In 1985 I and about 100 other like-dressed folks flew on a chartered jet from Philadelphia to a couple places in Europe. You could still smoke on international flights, but had tosit in the back of the plane. I was sitting next to a really cute dental technician that was going to Naples, but we were in the non-smoking section. A friend offered to switch, but after one look at the girl next to me, I said no. And in a 14 hour flight, we maybe exchanged ten sentences. Maybe romances only start on airplanes if there is a film crew involved?
Wow! She really is one of the cool kids!
I’m loving your stories, gt. Too bad your fantasy didn’t pan out, tho…
Mornin’ all. My life hasn’t really been worth posting about lately, but this is supposed to be mundane…
Hubby worked late last night, and I already cooked dinner for last night the night before. Vegetable beef soup, mmm. So I sat around and watched stuff I had DVR’ed. ER! I still love that show. And I watched the People’s Choice awards. Funny guy who hosted that! I don’t know his name. We ate dinner after Tom finally came home at 8:00. Then we both fell asleep in our chairs.
How exciting, huh? Tonight I’m making sketti and meatballs.
This morning as I drove into work, waiting for the Impossible Left Turn that can get me stuck for five minutes or more, it hit me–this is the last time I’ll be driving to work this way. After today, I’m off until Tuesday, and then I’ll be coming to work from a completely different direction. It’s not terribly exciting, but it’s exciting nevertheless.
I’m absolutely, irretrievably, no-doubt-about-it exhausted. But I love it, so I’m okay. I found another place-I-didn’t-look last night–the freezer. I think there’s frozen corn from when I moved in. That gets taken care of tonight, along with the little that remains in the fridge. But I have to do it all before Lost comes on, of course. 
:: yawns and stretches ::
Top o’ the mornin’ to everyone. I got up unusually early (for me) today: 7 am. :eek: I had to take my sister to school if I wanted to have the car available for later today; I’m going to a friend’s house later. But first, it’s time to actually get some work done on this paper I’ve been avoiding. I have to write 10 pages cataloguing my research efforts thus far. It will become my undergraduate thesis, and become part of a publication that, if all goes well, I will present at the 2006 meeting of the Materials Research Society in San Francisco!
Now I just have to write the damn thing. Man, doing work is hard.
Can they help me by this time tomorrow? :eek: (I will not panic, I will not panic)
Through the ARM? The ARM?!? And here I was --all this time–trying to use my brain!
No wonder I suck in math!
I must be desparate–I find this strangely alluring. You could send “subtle” messages via the choice of book you throw!
Red Velvet Cake is a Southern thing that one hears about forever and then when it is finally tried, one wonders what all the fuss is about. It really doesn’t taste like anything–I’ve had vanilla ice cream that had more flavor.
I think you would need to have had it since childhood for it to be special.
anyrose --your use of color and size is quite intimidating. Not sure now if I can even be a cool kid…<digs toe in carpet>
Mmmh–airplane romance daydreams (too fleeting to be fantasies)–I crushed horribly on two British Air stewards waaaaaay back in 1978 when my German Club in HS flew to Germany (seriously). They were so damned cute–I still have pics of them (proving the theory that kids will take pics of anything/one!). Ah, youth.
FCM --I like the two lidded pot. I can’t see the other pic-empty page says loading is done. (?) Does the lid come off? (just askin’)
I’m jonesing for some popovers tonoc for dinner. But what to go with? Oh, don’t make go to all the trouble of shopping and cooking beef. I like bouf–just don’t like all the effort it takes. So, popovers and ? Maybe just popovers…
Heck. I think you’re pretty cool as is.
[sally field]
She likes me! She really likes me!
[/sally field]
Hafta go to a meeting today at work. Can I share with all of you when I LEFT work yesterday?
Keep in mind that I should punch out at 1930 (7:30 pm). I left at 2100. Got home in time to bath and prop eyes open for Daily Show (worth it). Yesterday, I had 2 pts on ventilators-both in contact isolation, another pt in isolation, and a 4th pt. Two of these I took to surgery, one I discharged to a rehab facility–oh, never mind.
I am exhausted. I need to do my 4th and final practice exam, but I can’t even focus still. Guess I’ll do it this afternoon.
I STILL don’t have any of my results available on the Princeton site, despite emails from them telling me differently. :rolleyes:
I am going to channel Spats Rifty (that’s his gangster name) for my math skills. Anyone care to write my essay?
Don’t look at me. I only got a 530 on the verbal
I’ve just started reading War of the Flowers, which Mr. Lissar got me for Christmas, and then read himself, as quaslity control. Highly recommend it. It’s by Tad Williams, on of my favourite authors. Yesterday I read Better Off by Eric Brende. It’s by an MIT grad who spent a year and a half in a semi-Amish community, and it’s sort of a dissertation on whether or not technology improves life. Interesting.
Today is laundry, tidy, vacuum and sweep day. Don’t y’all wish you had my glamourous, exciting life?
Come do my house when you’re finished?
Ooh–the Brende book sounds intriguing.
My house looks like a tip. I like that British word–it resonates more with me than pit (and now pit means the BBQ Pit to me). It’s disgusting–I have put off almost all cleaning until Friday. Just close your eyes and concentrate on my stunning conversational skills…
So, we just had a minor celebration-with-cake for my boss’ 59th birthday today. When she mentioned how old she was, I said “That’s interesting–my mother’s fifty-ninth is on Saturday.”
Then somebody told me that I was insensitive because I told her she was old enough to be my mother. What? I don’t get it. It’s not insensitive, it’s math, for fuck’s sake. It’s coincidence. And she had a daughter about my age, so naturally she’s old enough to be my mother. She didn’t take it wrong, she thought it was a neat coincidence.
I hate it when people who have no right to be offended about anything get up in my face.
And I’d really like to go now, since this is my last day this week.
Draelin, I am ABSOLUTELY OFFENDED that it’s your last day of the week!
Harrumph!