Hello, Dallas!

Well, this morning bright and early, I crawled on a Boeing 737-800 Jet and less than 2 hours later, I was landing in Dallas, Texas and Pueblo, Colorado was back in the rear view mirror.  I have lived 76 years and never even been tempted to leave the ground, but here I am!  When I got off the airplane, I still had no idea where I was and yet Sam found me before I could figure it out.  And then he scooped my suitcase off the carousel and we were headed across Dallas to his house.  7 1/2 hours after I left the house, I have traveled what would have taken me 14 hours to drive, ate a granola bar, had a nap and am on my second glass of water.

So what I have dreaded for all of my life has turned out to be a really cool adventure.  There is something about soaring way high above the earth that is very humbling.  To just be able to look out the window and see the tiny little world down below, is an adventure that can not be told, but has to be experienced.  Something about looking down on the clouds makes one feel infinitesimal.  I had made up my mind that I would just do it and that is what I did.  I had many people give me pointers on flying, but I knew it would have to be done to know for myself.

Oh, when the plane was taxing down the runway and it began to shudder a little and the guy in the seat next to me said, "No, that is not normal" I did know a little moment of panic, but then I remembered what Gayle's husband said about it being much like a car ride only way bigger and there would be some turbulence, I relaxed.  I figured about the worst that could happen was a fiery crash, but hell, when you are my age something is going to get  me and it might as well be a newsworthy event.   But here I am.  Sam had all the work of booking it, and paying for it, all I had to do was get on board and I am very glad I did.  For that I thank him.

I have a book at home by a photographer named Wark that is all aerial photos and I now know what they look like in real time.  There are many circles in Colorado and Oklahoma that I have no idea what they are.  I saw dried up rivers and lakes and reservoirs that I never knew existed.  Lot of farmland all green and growing.  So tonight I shall go to bed in Texas and instead of visions of sugar plums, I shall have vistas of clouds and mountains.  As for flying, I wish I had tried this back when I was young.  I might have been a bird! 

An exercise in futility.

Mother called a lot of the things I did "an exercise in futility" and she was right on things like holding a marriage together, hoping for a raise, cleaning house with 5 kids under the age of 6, and she was usually right.  Now let me tell you what the biggest "exercise in futility" is in my world today.  It is that damned email.

When I open AOL a cheerful voice announces "You've got mail!"  It is such a cheerful voice and I never cease to open said mail box.  I run the cursor down the list and click on the first one that is an actual email from someone I know.  Early in the morning it is not unusual to have 45 or 50 emails and maybe 2 will be real communications from a real person.  I deal with those and then go to any that says  "Paypal", "Etsy" or "ebay".  Paypal will be an order and Etsy is usually a question and ebay requires some sort of action.  These days orders are a rarity.  AOL sorts my email and puts a lot of it in the spam folder.  I look at that list and click the "delete all" button.  Then comes the part that pisses me off.

I go back to the original mail list and look at the first one.  I open it and it is from some vitamin company.  Now if I simply delete it, they think I like to read their crap and the send me more.  Learned my lesson the hard way on that!  So I go to the bottom of their spiel and click the "unsubscribe" button.  It pisses me off that I have to unsubscribe to something that I never subscribed to in the first place, but that is beside the point.  I click on "unsubscribe" and if the gods are smiling on me I get the "sorry to see you go your name has been removed."  That is in an ideal world.  More often than not I get one of the following:

"We are sorry to lose you.  Please update the reason you are leaving." which is a pain in my keester.

Or a simple "you are unsubscribe ."  That is good.

But the one that sends me through the roof is the one that pops up and says: "You must prove you are not a robot."  Then there is a set of pictures. "Choose the pictures with cars."  I do that.  "Choose the pictures with street signs."  I do that.  "Chose the pictures with store fronts."  It is at this point that I loose it.

I have been know to write scathing letters telling them that no way in hell do I need Viagra or whatever they are wanting to sell me and hit the send button.  On those occasions I immediately hear the click on AOL that means I have mail and it is to say that my missive has been returned because that mail box is not a reply address.  Grrrrrrrrrrrr!

So now here I set wasting time telling you things you already know.  The cat is on my lap digging her claws in the tender part of my legs and bumping my chin with her head and the mailbox is continuing to open and close over on the open screen under this one.

So there you go.  My bitching for the day.  A definite exercise in futility if I ever saw one!

It must be spring.

I was setting at the computer today and I felt something brush my hair.  Now since I live alone here with a cat and a dog, something brushing past my head is cause to make me become alert.  Sure enough, a little Sparrow landed on the shadowbox on the wall by my desk.  I opened the front door and tried to shoo him that way, but he did not understand.  Of course Icarus was helping me since she had brought him in with hopes of him being supper for her.  I finally got him herded into a place where I could drop a dish towel over him and carry him outside.  I found him a nice place inside an evergreen where he could safely get his bearings before flying back to his family.  

I do not know why that silly cat becomes a hunter in the Spring of the year or maybe it is the birds are young and not wise to the ways of cats and are more easily caught.  Now the wind is whistling through a window that is not quite shut and scaring me.  I guess maybe I am a little paranoid because I went out to Los Pobres for lunch with my friends out there and on the way home I got to thinking about that little white line in the middle of the road.  Life is sort of like that line.  As long as I stay on my side and the car coming towards me stays on the other side, we are both good to go and will pass by never really seeing each other at all.  But if one of us were to cross that line we would both suffer.  Life is like that.  As long as I do the things expected of me and you do the things expected of you, we will never have a problem.  We drift through life never really knowing the people we see on a daily basis and then one day, we are gone.  

Some times I think maybe I am lonely, but I do not want to change my life to incorporate another human into it.  I go to bed when I am tired and get up when I am through sleeping.  If there were another person here, I would need to take their needs into consideration.  I eat what I want, when I want and rarely close the door when I shower.  I may get up at 3:30 AM or sleep till 6:00.  I have been known to eat lunch in my pajamas's and sometimes the sink is full of dirty dishes and the laundry covers the floor in the bathroom.  I do not always answer the phone just because it rings.

So, this is my mood tonight.  Needless to say, I do not like the wind.  I have never really seen a use for it,  but then nobody really asked me, did they?