We are fam-il-y

My adorable nephew. Umm, I didn't teach him the finger up the nose thing, in case you're wondering!

Have a holly jolly Christmas

Where to begin? So many stories, so little time!

I arrived at the airport for my 114 pm flight a few minutes after 11 am figuring there is going to be a line at the ticket counter and a line to go through security, but I would still be early enough to have time to relax for a few minutes before boarding. Think again. At 1145 am, I was sitting in a seat at the gate waiting for the next hour and fifteen minutes to board my flight! There was no line at the ticket counter and I walked right up. I was about eighth or ninth in the line to go through security and I that didn’t take long either. So I plopped myself down, plugged in my laptop and here I am writing this post!

My flight to Atlanta was pleasant and the flight attendant was attractive and attentive, so that was nice.

When I arrived in Atlanta, I went right to the ticket counter to ask if I could get on standby for the earlier flight to Richmond, since I was on the last flight out, but wanted to get there earlier. The CSR asked if I carried on my bags and when I replied no, he said he was sorry, but I have to travel with my bags - even though we know this isn’t always true since luggage is lost all the time and if everyone were traveling with their bags, that would not occur – but I digress! So I consigned myself to my 5 hour layover and found a spot to plug myself in again and write this post! Remember all of this for future reference – you’ve been warned!

While I was waiting in line to speak with the CSR, there was a little boy, all of 3 years old sitting with his mother on the floor, near the gate. As every passenger passed by him, he yelled out, “Merry Christmas!” and we all thought it was funny and cute. The flight attendants waiting to board the plane were laughing hysterically, because it was pretty funny. The best part, however, was when all of a sudden, out of nowhere, he yells, “Welcome to Atlanta!” followed by,“Happy Holidays!” and then he went back to his original greeting. It was so funny, if I had been in a bad mood, that surely would’ve turned it around.

I boarded my regularly scheduled flight around 855 thinking, “There is no way this plane is taking off on time (906 pm), but 15 minutes won’t kill us.” At 955 pm we finally pulled away from the gate after a few announcements from the Captain as to why we were still sitting there. At 1010 pm, we officially took off and at 1115 pm, we arrived at the gate in Richmond, almost 40 minutes late. I’m also going to mention that our landing was not bumpy, but it wasn’t smooth either. The term I am using is, “We Bounced.” Seriously, I think the pilot bounced us on the first touchdown and then eased it down again. It was a jarring landing, to say the least. Nonetheless, there is more!

I found my sister waiting for me and went to go get my luggage. After watching my entire flight find their luggage and leave the airport, we were left standing there, wondering where my bags are! So I trotted to the service counter and let the man know the situation. He asked for my last name and when I gave it to him he smiled, chuckled and said, “Your bags are already here, they came in on the earlier flight!” I asked him how that could’ve happened and he told me it happens all the time because the handlers don’t look at the time of the flight, the just see the code and put it on the next plane. So my bags and flew without me. Do you think they were scared of not being picked up?

Happy Holidays

Where you are thats where I want to be and through your eyes are all the things I want to see. In the night you're my dreams, you’re everything to me.

RIP
"The Great Mom"

I pledge allegiance to a nation without borders, without pride, without politicians like ourselves

I spend a small amount of time each day reading various blogs regarding problems with our local, state, national and international politics. I read people bitching, sharing their various annoyances and I read the reported facts regarding their issues so I am informed and can understand why they’re angry. The problem that has gotten under my skin recently however, is that while it is our American right to bitch, it’s also our American right to do something proactive to change these things. We all seem to have something to say and we are more than willing to use the fairly anonymous medium of the internet to say it, but I don’t see or read about anybody actually doing something about these issues. It’s all well and good that we can sign petition after petition at moveon.org and other places to share our displeasure, but that doesn’t entirely solve the problem. Here are my 2 cents: I think the blogging community should start running for public office. Apparently, bloggers all know what the problems are, it’s obvious to us, Joe Public, but it’s not as obvious to our government officials. Most bloggers who read and write about political ineptitude are pretty smart people and they reach the audience that many politicians, in my opinion, feel they are above. Why not turn our passion for cleaning up bureaucracy into a political campaign to stop the lying, cheating and ignorance that beholds many of our public officials. I think we could do it if we all put our heads together! Think of the things we could accomplish! We would focus on the needs of real people, who have real problems, instead of giving another tax cut to the wealthiest 1% of us. We could also tell auto manufacturers to raise the CAFE standards, which, in turn, would drop the price of oil and save us all a little money in the end. Hell, as long as we’re saving some money, then we could institute logical and fair campaign finance reform, which of course we would all abide by, and save more money! Politicians wouldn’t need to shuffle money from one place to the next to pay for our campaigns and end up in prison because we were so power hungry we were willing to do anything to keep that power. Bloggers unite, rise up and be counted – literally – our voices are already heard on a daily basis. We have an audience, what we do with it is up to us.

Party all the time

Lots o’parties this weekend!

The City of Houston, Metro and the Downtown District wish to thank the community for its support as we celebrate the completion of the Downtown Midtown Transit Streets Project.
Friday, December 9, 2005
11:30 a.m. - 1 p.m.
Main Street Square

Enjoy fun, festivities, live music, a visit from Santa Claus and special surprise guests! Plus, register to win a holiday prize package to be drawn during the Mayor's Holiday Celebration, Saturday, Dec. 10 from 4:30 - 6:30 p.m. at City Hall.

Yea, I think I’ll pass.

Hot for teacher (as in red hot MAD!)

Have I mentioned that I am taking online classes? I don’t think that I have, so I am now. Of course, I can’t say which college I am enrolled in, but let’s just say that it’s probably the most popular one out there. One of my classes is called Internet Technologies, which is, basically, “how to use the Internet as a research, reference and study tool for your schooling”. Needless to say, it’s rather boring if you already know how to do this (see Google), but I have learned a couple new tricks and how to use the online library that is included with my rather costly tuition. Nonetheless, the instructor for this class has been able to get under my skin and I’ve never even verbally spoken to him. Our only contact is through email and he’s still managed to piss me off. Not only has he pissed me off, but he’s pissed off S as well. What has he done you ask? Here’s a list:

A day or two after we turn in an assignment, we receive the grade. A couple days into the new week, we then receive a summary of our grades for the previous weeks’ assignments with some comments. A few weeks back, he gave me a grade of 30/30 on the assignment, but on the summary, it was listed as 10/30. Of course, I wanted to know which one was right, so I emailed him and very politely asked which one was correct. He emailed back a few hours later saying, “OOOPs. my error. should be 30/30 and I will change that.” He didn’t say, “I’m sorry”, or apologize in any manner. This alone I felt was not a big deal until the next issue.

On my summary for week Five, which was just a couple weeks ago, none of the point values were filled in, just left as zeroes. Again, I emailed him to let him know of this situation and I joked, “Or did I do that poorly last week?” The response I received on this one, nothing. The only thing I received was a return email with the subject line reading, “Week 5 Summary Corrected”, but nothing in the body of the email, no apology again. I’m slightly ticked at this, but as long as it’s not affecting my grades, I guess I can let this slide, until this week’s problem.

We have an assignment due tonight, that I have yet to begin, but read through on Monday. Here is the assignment:

Correct the misconceptions of “Joe Student”, who believes he can work full-time and pursue his online degree without modifying the study habits he used in high school.

Offer suggestions to help Joe succeed as a distance learner.

I don’t quite fully understand this assignment because if “Joe Student” was a good student, who had acceptable study habits in high school, why would he think it won’t work for him in this scenario? So I emailed the instructor again, 120 words worth, with a number of questions and this is the response I received concerning my email, “Joe is anyone; any student grades are unimportant in this assignment.”

What? How can grades be unimportant when talking about study habits? Don’t good study habits lead to good grades? I’ve posed these questions, along with this whole situation to S and a few people at work and the response I’m getting is, “It’s time to just put some BS down on paper.” Unfortunately, I don’t even know where to begin! Any help on this would be appreciated, but this assignment is due by midnight Central Time, so if you could be expeditious in your response, I’d be very grateful to you.

Baby, it's cold outside

It's pretty chilly here today, 31 degrees when I left for work, but probably about 20 with the wind chill, so I am wearing a sweater and my winter coat, which of course is made for winters in Buffalo, not necessarily for a few cold days in Houston. Nonetheless, I'm getting shit about it from my coworkers! I told them this is cold, even for people from the North, but they still insist on ragging on me. I don't remember complaining about how ridiculously hot was when it was 110 degrees with the heat index this summer! They need to lay off and stop coming to my office to razz me, it's really childish.

It’s the safety dance

This is our government at work. Maybe we need to send them a wake up call by voting their lazy asses out of office!

I saw a great bumper sticker this morning:

W
Our Scarlet Letter

That’s all I have to say about that.

(Click the title of this post for the news story.)

A bottle of white, a bottle of red. Perhaps a bottle of rose instead?

Why is it that when you go out with a large group of people for dinner, someone inevitably says, let’s just take the bill and divide it by X number of people we have? In theory, this is a reasonable idea; however, because I am the person who usually does not drink all the wine, or have the $9 appetizer, I wind up being screwed. It’s even worse when we go out for someone’s birthday because that person doesn’t pay, so there is one less to divide by. Over the weekend, twelve of us went out for a friend’s birthday and our share of the bill turned out to be $50 each. I had a $9.95 burger and $1.95 Dr. Pepper. Even including my share of the birthday boy’s meal and a couple of bucks for the cake we bought, how does that equate to $50? I had none of the seven $18 bottles of wine; I didn’t eat any of the five different $9.95 appetizers that were ordered. I was royally screwed and I didn’t even enjoy it. My burger was undercooked and greasier that it should’ve been. The fries were lukewarm. I don’t plan on going back to that restaurant either, but that’s for another day. One of these days I’m going to bring a notepad and a calculator, see who eats and drinks what and calculate the bill that way. We’ll see how they like it when the person who drank two bottles of wine, had an appetizer, the $17 entrée and the cup of coffee for dessert is stuck with the biggest tab while I wind up paying hardly anything. I don’t disagree with the theory, it’s just not a practical matter when you have people like me in your group and I’m beginning to take offense to having to pay more than my share when I can’t afford it.

A star is torn

I like Gregory Peck as an actor as much as the next person, but this is ridiculous!