Though I miss my husband, I freakin’ love traveling. I’m currently in Atlanta waiting for my delayed flight. The weather here is windy and rainy. They turned the airport when we were landing and we almost had to go to Augusta, but we finally landed.
I’m watching planes take off from my vantage point at PF Chang’s in terminal A. I’m content and enjoying myself.
My life is awesome.
I am flying somewhere every weekend this month. This is highly unusual for me but it is slightly reminiscent of when my dad would fly quite a bit during the summer months.
I love flying. I even enjoy flying on the airlines again. I am a lucky man to be able to do what I love to do.
Flights this month are for both business and pleasure and will take me to three of the time zones in the lower 48 states. Aside from a trip home from San Diego, I will be earning lots of Delta miles.
My life is grand. My life is actually grand altogether. And as I enjoy wifi and a free beer at 37,000 feet (the credit card machine wasn’t working), I can’t help but smile.
So I am on my way to a weekend adventure with our friends Jeff and Mark in Durham, N.C. On my way to the airport, I came to the realization that I hadn’t had any lunch and that I would probably not get much to eat in between here and there, as eating on a plane is usually limited to a bag of peanuts and half a can of diet pop. On the bright side, since I’m taking two flights to get from here to there, I will manage to squeeze in a full can of pop by adding the two half-cans of pop from each flight together.
And they say math is difficult.
In many areas of the country there are interesting restaurants and the like near the airport of said destination. In Syracuse it’s a different story. Syracuse Airport is actually near the Village of North Syracuse and while there’s a lot of chain restaurants in the area, nothing that I would really call “nice” comes to mind immediately. I decided to indulge my curiosity and gives these new “Satisfries” a try at the Burger King closest to the airport. I remember this location from my childhood when it was actually a Carrols1, but it’s a Burger King now and it’s been there for a long time.
Upon entering the restaurant I noticed a warning sign on the door that proclaimed no videography or still photography was allowed in the restaurant. I think this sort of thing is kind of bogus and I was a rebel, because I noticed that a group of people had just left a HUGE mess in the dining area.
Now, I think that I’m a pretty responsible citizen of the United States (rebellious photography notwithstanding) and for the life of me I can not figure out how anyone could leave a public place in such a state and not give any care about it. This is mind boggling to me and such activity only leaves me to be seriously concerned about our society as a whole.
So I ordered a grilled chicken sandwich (hold the mayo!) and the new Satisfries. They smelled and looked like fries, albeit krinkle-kut fries instead of the usual shoestring fries that Burger King serves (I think). I’m thinking the krinkle-kut approach is so they can tell the difference in the fryer, but that’s just me.
The first thing I noticed about the fries is that if you like salt, you’re going to love these because they are really salty. Like, the way salty fries used to be before people cared about sodium and all that. I liked that, though my blood pressure probably doubled in the process. As far as fat content and coatings and all that stuff, I couldn’t really discern a difference from regular fries and I suppose that was the intent. Other than the krinkleness of the fries, they seemed like good ol’ unhealthy fast food fries.
After watching a very large woman make her way to the self-serve drink station not once but TWICE with a 32-oz cup, and watching her fill said cup with regular coke2, I finished my meal, made my way around the mess in the dining room and headed for the airport.
I was barely in the airport ten minutes later when I was making a bee-line (not the Florida tollroad) to anything that resembled a toilet. I didn’t care if it was unisex, no sex, all sex or a potted plant, but I needed to use the rest room. Immediately. I found this curious as I had done my business at home before leaving for this little journey, so I’m thinking the Satisfries did something to my digest system. Or it could have been the premium chicken (hold the mayo). Or it could have been the fact that I ate at Burger King at all, since I tend to avoid that sort of thing nowadays.
I felt much better 10 minutes later.
Did I find the Satisfries satisfying? At the time of consumption, yes I did. However, based on my one experience with these, if you’re going to eat these things, I would suggest that you plan your rest stops accordingly.
Best of luck and bon appetit.
1 The Carrols brand is still alive and well in Helsinki and I have actually considered flying there to see if the fast food there is as good as I remember it being when I was a child.
2 I really struggle with the revenue model implemented by the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) when I see people blatantly making poor health choices and then the entire population ends up paying for these poor health choices. While I believe that everyone is entitled to health care, I believe that people need to be accountable for their own actions. I don’t have a solution to the problem, so I don’t wretch about it too loudly, but I don’t think that any of the legislated or proposed ideas fulfill the need adequately. I think a societal shift is in order and I don’t see that happening anytime soon.
At lunch time I found myself watching the very last episode of “The Secrets of Isis”. Part of a shorter second season, this episode was actually a pilot for a new series that would have been called “The Super-Sleuths”. They pulled out all the stops with this episode as they used plenty of blue screen effects, and both Captain Marvel and Isis were seen to be flying side by side.
I think they made a pretty cool couple, though in a short story I wrote years and years ago, Andrea Thomas (the incognito version of Isis) didn’t marry Captain Marvel, since he was really Billy Batson who was a teenager that hung out with an old man named Mentor, but rather she married teacher friend Rick Mason.
Though Jason Bostwick tends to be the favored actor that portrayed Captain Marvel in this series, as a young lad I always found myself much more attracted to John Davey, pictured here with JoAnna Cameron in their superhero roles. Mr. Davey had a friendly clean-shaven lumberjack come math teacher vibe about him.
I know Ms. Cameron lives in Hawaii and does the comic circuit from time to time, but I have no idea as to what happened John Davey.
Interesting footnote, the vast majority of both the “Shazam!” and “The Secrets of Isis” series were filmed outdoors because Filmation simply didn’t have the budget for lighting. The astute observer will also notice that Andrea Thomas almost always wears the same blazer regardless of where she is or what she’s doing, because the transformation sequence from Andrea to Isis is always the same sequence.
I was a little groggy this morning as I stumbled around the house getting ready for my day. I had just jumped on the scale, and while my weight went up, my BMI went down quite a bit. I’m a bit of a gambler, I can negotiate numbers when I need to. The most important thing is I’m feeling good and that’s what matters. Maybe my grogginess kept me from drop kicking the scale.
When I opened the refrigerator to start breakfast assembly, I instantly noticed that Earl had already prepared my lunch for the day.
It was delicious. 🙂
So I’ve been trying to workout in the morning again. Last week I worked out after supper and it didn’t, well, work out well for me (god that’s awful syntax) because I ended up feeling all hyped up and therefore I didn’t sleep very well. Plus, my scale couldn’t care less that I had done any sort of exercise.
On Monday morning I awoke and headed to the gym at oh-dark-early, where a bunch of chipper elders did their thing on the various machines as I did the same. Did I mention that I’m not really a fan of the gym? I think I would be much more content if I could just work out in the basement and do things on our own equipment, but it’s not in the budget, so we haul off to the gym across town. At oh-dark-early.
Yesterday morning I was up before the sun again but I made the determination that I wasn’t going to go to the gym, after all, the weather is still enjoyable and even though it was dark, it was plenty warm enough to go for a bike ride.
So I rode the area roads in the dark, dependent on the white light of a single headlight and the red light of a single taillight. I wore a reflective vest on top of my cycling gear to complete my ensemble.
When I’m out for a relatively short ride I usually enjoy riding along the nearby paved Canal Trail, but when it’s dark I fear the presence of skunks. I’m not really afraid of the skunk as much as I’m afraid that I’ll make them afraid and then there’ll be an unfortunate Skunk Incident and I’ll end up spending the next three weeks in the garage as I air out. So I avoided the Canal Trail and any suggestion of skunks and rode around town a bit before heading out towards the open country, doing a lovely loop (horizontal, not vertical), and heading back home. Once I was away from the street lights I was able to see a beautifully clear, starlit sky that was accented by just a hint of moon.
It was exercise perfection. I’m hoping I can do it again before the end of the week.
So at work we have this internal communications tool called Microsoft Lync. It’s an Instant Messaging platform offered through the company’s Office 365 subscription and has replaced the multiple and makeshift platforms we were using before (some of us were on AOL, some on Yahoo, some on an internal Jabber server, etc.)
As a telecommuter I feel that it’s important to have Lync up and running at all times. This keeps me connected to my peers and it lets people know my current status: whether I’m at my computer or not, whether I’m in a meeting or not, etc.
While Lync is wonderful for impromptu and quick conversations, I have to admit that I often feel like this as more and more Lync windows open up on my MacBook screen. (Video may be loud and contain salty language).
Photo courtesy of Aljazeera America news website.
So Earl and I were going to drive to DC today to visit the Smithsonian and perhaps the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. Actually, we weren’t going to do that but if we were going to do that we would be wasting our time because as of 12:01 a.m., the government has shut down all non-essential services. This is all because Congress has been wasting our time by pretending that they’re going to do something. The truth of the matter is that we all know they’re not going to do anything because they’re incapable of progress. And they wonder why they have an approval rating close to the single digits.
Look, I’m on a happy vibe today so I’m not going to debate the arguments of who is right and who is wrong and who should do what to make whomever happy. I will admit that I am frustrated that the government basically cherry-picked what services would be shutdown and what would stay open. I think that if you’re going to go through all the grandstanding and politicizing and drama of getting to the point of where you’re going to shut down the government, then those making these decisions shouldn’t be paid. If you’re not doing your job, you don’t get a salary. Plain and simple.
I also feel that if they shut down the government then they should have shut down the FAA, the Post Office and other services they have deemed as “essential”. People may strongly object to this, but I think all FAA directed air traffic should have been brought to a ground stop at 12:01 a.m. with the shutdown of the government. There are other ways to get from point A to point B. It’s inconvenient, I know, oh do I know, but if you’re going to use a shutdown as a grandstanding measure, land the planes and turn the equipment off. Not being able to get into National Parks or delaying the arrival of a new passport? It’s inconvenient and will get some press but it doesn’t really demonstrate the incompetency of our current government to the majority of the American people. If there were thousands of airline passengers stranded in our airports or Suzie Citizen couldn’t get her QVC shipment because UPS can’t fly from there to here, all because of our the idiocy of Congress, more American citizens would take notice and I bet they would think twice before just blindly casting a vote at the next election.
I know, I’m being optimistic to think that a lot of Americans vote these days.
I think it’s horrible that the family that just trucked across South Dakota last night can’t see Mount Rushmore today. A beautiful national monument: off limits. What does that say about the country that is constantly touting itself as the “greatest nation on earth”? While this shutdown of non-essential services will have a somewhat detrimental effect in the short term, I don’t think it will budge the apathetic nature of the average American citizen. Stopping the planes? Stopping the mail? Stalling social security checks, Medicaid and Medicare? *That* would have a horrible, awful, terrible effect on our country, but maybe then the American citizens would wake up and see how dysfunctional our government is becoming and start making better choices at the polls. At the very least, maybe our elected leaders wouldn’t be so quick to bicker like children and start threatening ridiculous tactics like this shutdown.
A quick caveat, I am going to be flying all over the place this month. I would definitely be affected by any sort of ground stop on planes in the name of a government shutdown. But I would still support such a thing.
Just a guy with a husband. We’ve been together 28 years and he still makes me see fireworks on a daily basis. Hiker. Storm Chaser. Private Pilot. Tech Guy. Hackerish.
Weird? Eccentric!
