Fun and Games Dept

As seen from Amtrak headed toward New Orleans.

We are making progress on our Amtrak ride to New Orleans. According to Apple Maps we have about 185 miles to go.

We both had a decent night’s sleep and feel pretty good. Sharlene in the dining car has been very nice and we enjoyed a very good breakfast sandwich this morning. I also had “coffee, black”.

As we were in Memphis at sunrise and now we’re keeping it low key as we make our way down through Mississippi. I’ve never been the length of Mississippi before, the scenery and small towns are giving me a better perspective of the state. I’m happy for the experience.

Earl and I are on our way to New Orleans for an extended weekend. About an hour ago our Amtrak train, appropriately named “City of New Orleans” left Union Station Chicago. We are in an upper level Roomette on a sleeper car. We just enjoyed dinner in the Dining Car.

The roomette is quite quaint. It’s like having two first class seats on a B777 facing each other with the option of popping up a table between the seats or dropping a bed from the ceiling. I’ll be sleeping on the top bunk tonight.

The train ride in just shy of 20 hours long. I’m enjoying watching the scenery go by at 70-80 MPH, even if it’s currently 9:00 PM at night. I’m comfortable and content.

This Amtrak ride is a test to see if we’ll enjoy riding across 2/3 of the country in a similar configuration, either to or from Los Angeles from or to Chicago. I look forward to that trek across the desert.

This will be our third trip to New Orleans in 23 years; and my fourth time total. It should be a fun little vacation.

I am thankful to have all kinds of family. I hope anyone reading this in the United States has a wonderful Thanksgiving. If you’re elsewhere, happy Thursday!

We scored some tickets to Cher’s “Here We Go Again” show tonight at the United Center. We were delighted to find we were in row six.

The show was very enjoyable. I was very impressed by her stamina and performance. Her voice is still top notch, both with and without electronic augmentation. She auto-tunes for effect, not to mask a lack of talent.

She performed several ABBA numbers, including “Watertloo”, “S.O.S.”, and “Fernando”.

All in all a great show. A wonderful experience.

IDS Center in 2013.

I’ve been reading old blog posts this evening. My husband has patiently listened as I read him prose I find particularly witty; he has the patience of a saint.

While going through old blog posts I found a bunch of entries from 2013 when I went on a solo long-weekend vacation in Minneapolis. The trip marked a couple of firsts; it was my first time in Minneapolis, it was my first time flying in first class, and the trip marked the first time I would stop in a random town in Minnesota and cheer a homecoming parade along with natives I didn’t know.

The folks in the midwest are very friendly. I’ve always known that.

The blog entries from the aforementioned trip can be found starting here.

When I read blog entries from a few years ago I always find myself remarking about how I used to write longer blog entries instead of just belching out a few paragraphs. Things have decidedly change with the full-tilt ramp up of Social Media; I guess I should be happy that I’m still writing in a blog at all. 95% of the bloggers I used to follow gave up long ago. The few that still write in their blogs on a regular basis are always a welcome relief from the bits and burps of 280 characters.

My biggest takeaway from the trip to Minneapolis was the flight back home to Syracuse (our home airport at the time). The Delta Connection flight had to do go-arounds in high winds to land on runway 15, which is one of the crosswind runways. As others were tense and nervous during the go around procedures I was loving every minute of it and it was at that moment I decided that I had waited long enough to become a private pilot. I contacted the local flight school within a week and before the end of that month I had my first lesson in a 1966 Piper Cherokee 140.

I’ll probably blog about that experience again on the anniversary of the actual lesson.

I’ve been in a particularly pensive and introspective mood over the past couple of days; feeling much like I did in the days leading up to that solo vacation in 2013. Earl and I have a vacation planned for next week and I’m feeling like it’s going to be a great little adventure for us.

We’re never too old to seek new experiences, push our boundaries, and try something new. And we’re never too old to stop writing about it.

Here’s the blog entry where I talk about the landing. 

When I was a kid I was in charge of the outside holiday decorating. I was excited when we moved into the new house in 1977 because we had more space for more Christmas decorations. It would be a couple of years before Dad would arrange for landscaping on the property, but I managed to get a couple of strands of Christmas lights wrapped around the poles on the front porch and two sets of lights around two of the panes of the living room window.

I was always excited by the twinkling of Christmas lights; before moving to the new house we lived in a 10’x50′ mobile home with an 8’x40′ addition my dad built in 1970. The first bedroom wasn’t even big enough for a single bed (it was designed to be a nursery, with room for a crib and that was about it) so that room became a storage room with a space for a litter box. I knew my mom stored the Christmas lights in the closet in that room and it would far from Christmas when I would drag the lights out and enjoy them on a Sunday morning when mom and dad were still sleeping. That was when we had the traditional glass C5 type lights; it wouldn’t be until we moved to the new house in ’77 that we had the smaller “midget” Christmas lights that became popular. They were $1.99 for a set of 35 lights at the local Rite Aid. I don’t remember the manufacturer. The reflector and the base for the bulb were all one piece, versus the version you could buy at Sears or Montgomery Ward where the bulb was separate from the reflector. The “petal” type, shown in the photo above, were the most common, though there were other styles made by different manufacturers, some looked like crowns, and others looked like star points. Even though they were made by different manufacturers, they all had a common base, so you could mix and match between the different types of reflectors, though sometimes the voltage was off. My interest in electricity helped; I figured out how to switch bulbs by unbending the two small wires and moving them to a different reflector.

When the landscaping was installed in 1979 or 1980, I went crazy that year, begging my mother to purchase another set of lights every time she ran into town. She acquiesced as much as the budget would allow and for a few years we had lots of lights out front. The power meter would probably shake itself off the pole but I thought it was beautiful.

I’d spend two weeks up to Thanksgiving setting up the lights with the hard and fast rule that I was not allowed to light anything up until the night of Thanksgiving. We celebrated Thanksgiving and then we celebrated Christmas. There was no encroaching on the Thanksgiving holiday with twinkling lights. I respected that and I still sort of have that rule today.

We were recently in our local Walgreens and I took a peek at the Christmas lights display. One word immediately came to mind: BORING. There are hardly any lights with reflectors. The old $1.99/35 sets from days past had two circuits so you could make every other light blink in tandem or have two different sets of blinking lights in the same strand. From what I could tell through my quick perusal through Walgreens, the cheap lights simply just blink on and off in unison. One circuit.

I still find wonder in any Christmas lights display, but as I get older I find I prefer the older incandescent lights, whether the big C5 or C7 bulbs or the smaller lights. The new LED lights just have this cold look to them that don’t convey a Christmas warmth. Hopefully technology will improve in that regard.

My husband is anxious to put up Christmas lights. I remind him he can but he has to wait until Thanksgiving night to let them up.

We’ll see if that rule holds true this week.

It’s family board game night. I enjoy these activities very much.

So first the time in a long while I’m sitting at a Panera eating dinner while writing a blog entry. Two of the family members are off to a Blackhawks game, so I took the opportunity to go to the airport to talk airplanes with fellow pilots. It was a great discussion and I’m looking forward to new aviation adventures in the near future.

There’s a reason I haven’t sought out a Panera experience since moving to Chicagoland. When we lived in the Mohawk Valley of upstate N.Y. going to Panera was a wild Saturday night in the ‘burbs. Folks traveled from near and far to go to that Panera and we were among their number.

Here in Chicago? Not so much. I mean, it’s nice, it even exceeds adequate, but regardless of the location it’s the same experience no matter where you are.

Support your local businesses.

I thought it’d be fun to eat dinner at Panera again before heading back into the city, and the experience is absolutely adequate, but nothing is really blowing up my skirt.

At least I’m not hungry anymore.

This video was in my YouTube suggestions this morning and I must say I really enjoyed the presentational style of the person on camera.

Enjoy a video explaining the differences between VHS and Beta.