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Before I start… Happy Birthday Sweetheart!

Earl and I are sitting at Albany International Airport awaiting Southwest flight #2975 for Baltimore at 8:25 a.m. From there, we head to Orlando and fun and frivolity and Disney World.

I thought I was going to get beat down to the ground by a very butch woman at the security checkpoint. I understand that these new security procedures are for our own good, but I really do not enjoy it. I didn’t hear her tell me to take off my coat, boots and belt, I thought she just had to look at them. So just became a bit hysterical when she thought I ignored her and tried to breeze through security with a belt on. So then I had to take off my belt and boots and jacket and put them through x-ray. Then I made the metal detector beep anyways. Apparently there’s a very small piece of metal in my wallet, which then I had to put that through x-ray as well.

I quipped that it would be easier to walk through naked. They didn’t appreciate that comment either.

So now we’re sitting here awaiting our flight. I was going to surf the internet while waiting, since there is no internet access in our hotel room, but I’m not in the mood to pay $6.95 for the privilege. I believe that technology has advanced enough that someone we need to work out free internet access in public places. Of course, that’s not really practical, but I think it’s a wonderful idea. Either that or there needs to be a common carrier or something like the way ATM machines work so that you can pay one carrier and get internet access on any network. Or put a cell phone SIM card into your computer and you’ll get a bill at the end of the month. But I’m not really crazy about sending my credit card number all over the place to pay for the internet.

Now I’m going to try and relax and enjoy our vacation.

Earl and I are officially on vacation. We are staying at a Hampton Inn near the Albany International Airport, so that we can catch our flight early tomorrow morning. I am more than ready to see sunny skies and feel the warm temperatures of Florida. DisneyWorld, here we come!

I had to kick the day off early this morning by taking Tom to his Gram’s. As usual, he complained about the ride the entire time, but once we got to Mom’s, he seemed to take to her apartment. I think he’s going to enjoy his stay, he has the whole place to himself, no other cats about.

Earl and I made it a diner day again, hitting our local haunt of Betty’s Diner for a noon-time breakfast, and then hitting the Circle Diner in suburban Latham for supper tonight.

I was cranky this afternoon but a nap seemed to cure that state of mind. I think I was anxious to get the hell out of Dodge and it just wasn’t happening quick enough for me. After I calmed down during my nap, I found myself back at center.

So now we’re going to relax in the hotel room for a bit, hit the hey early and then onto our Southwest Airlines flights tomorrow. Hopefully you won’t see us on Airline.

I’m not feeling overly inspired to write in my blog today. I’m home for lunch, forging through blowing and drifting snow to do so, and then I get to my PowerBook and BAM! Nothing.

So here I am just babbling on the internet. Earl is en route to his office, having a 7:00 a.m. meeting outside of Albany this morning. It’s amazing how much work has affected my typing style. Being a support tech, I type in trouble tickets (logs) all day long and without thinking I originally typed that sentence about Earl like this: Earl enr to off, using the typical geek shorthand that I use. Anyways, I hope his trip is safe since there’s apparently whiteout conditions on the Thruway.

There’s another shorthand phrase I use at work that hearkens from my programming days… “Cust will call w further tble else close tkt EOB.” It’s that clever use of ELSE from when I used to program in BASIC. Translated, “the customer won’t call if everything is fine, if we don’t hear from them, close the trouble ticket at the end of the day.”

I know, it’s all terribly mundane. But I amuse myself easily.

Tom and I have finally come to an understanding regarding my PowerBook. I have to face the fact that he’s just going to walk all over my desk whether I like it or not. However, he’s accepted the fact that the PowerBook is off limits and he’s content sleeping on the telephone on the other portion of my desk. As long as he’s not making any long distance calls, we’re fine.

Surprisingly, the day is flying by. I’m leaving work an hour early today (gotta love comp time), so I can get Earl a birthday present. I have no idea what to get him, since he says that the trip to Florida is his present, but I can’t let his birthday go by without giving him something else. Maybe I’ll surprise him and give whatever I decide to buy to him while we’re on the plane. He’ll be contently sleeping in the aisle seat, or next to the window, I’ll be wedged between him and someone else and I’ll throw an elbow into his side and give him a present.

That’ll be romantic.

Thinking about that scenario has inspired me with ideas for his present. I guess there was a reason to write in the blog after all.

This week seems to be lasting forever while time is flying by. I don’t even know if that’s statement makes sense, but that’s how I feel. Our vacation officially starts tomorrow evening at 5 p.m. Right now, I feel like I can reach out and almost touch the 5:00 on the clock and know that’s it there waiting for us. But at the same time, it feels like my half day on Monday was eons ago. There I go again obsessing about time.

We fly out of Albany on Sunday morning, so we’ll have all day Saturday to pack and get ready for the trip. Plus we need to drop Tom off at his Gram’s early Saturday morning, a first for him and my Mom. I think he’ll do fine, and I think my mom will as well.

In all honesty, we’ll probably be all packed in about an hour afterwards and then have nothing to do. Maybe we’ll have to make it a play night and head into Syracuse or something for supper and some recreation afterwards. Just sitting around the house will amount to nothing but boredom so we might as well make the most of it.

Tomorrow should pass by quickly, what with having to worry about the foot of snow we should wake up to in the morning and then dealing with all the related trouble calls at work. “My cordless phone isn’t working! Is there a power outage? Yes! Well that may have something to do with it.” Then we get the calls like “I want to move my phone to the other side of the living room, can you let more cable through the hole?”

I am so looking forward to this vacation. I’m ready for our little adventure. Just get here already!

As Earl and I get ready for our trip to Disney on Sunday, I’m thinking of bringing a book or two along just so I can sit down and read for a bit. Let my mind escape and my imagination wander. Being February, the parks at Disney close early, so I’m sure we’ll have plenty of down time.

I usually have two books going at once; a computer science instructional or educational book (I’m currently learning how to program in ‘C’) and something new-age-ish; the latest book by psychic Sylvia Browne, discussions of various aspects of spirituality, wicca, paganism, etc. I rarely sit down to read and enjoy it, unfortunately, I usually sit down to read and learn. Perhaps I work to hard to at reading.

I think I’m going to dig out my copy of “The Demu Trilogy” by F M Busby. It’s my favorite book of all time and I’ve read it at least 30 times over the past 25 years, but it’s been a while since I last took a look. It’s funny how my perceptions of the book change as I grow older, but I still find new nuances and passages on every read; things that I had never noticed before.

So as we escape to Disney, I’m looking forward to escaping into setting the computer aside and escaping into a book as well.

I just realized that the Grammy Awards were this past Sunday. Not being in the radio industry anymore, I was delighted to find out that the Grammys had gone by and I wasn’t even aware of it.

I’m not a big fan of the award shows. I think they are over-hyped, overrated wastes of time. Maybe I’m bitter because no one has ever offered me an award for doing my job. Well, that’s a lie. Back in 1989 I did earn “Employee of the Quarter” when I worked for Digital. That’s was an honor that still lives on my resumé to this day.

But I don’t get this whole idea of getting dressed up in outrageous outfits, sitting in an audience and hoping someone calls out my name because I did a really goob job at my latest gig. Wouldn’t the paycheck, positive reviews and recognition on the street be accolades enough? Apparently not. I think now we’re suppose to care about the upcoming Oscars. I heard Leonardo Di Caprio is up for The Aviator, along with a bunch of other awards. It was a great movie, so if there has to be awards given out, I suppose The Aviator is deserving. But do we have to accompany the Academy Awards with these pre-game shows? And then we have Plastica (Joan Rivers) doing a whole fashion run down for weeks afterwards. Who cares! Look in the mirror, you plastic bitch, then we’ll talk.

The best award show (if there is such a thing) ever was the Emmys after 9/11. Ellen DeGeneres did a fabulous job hosting, Babs took your breath away with her closing number, but more importantly, attendees were urged to wear business casual attire rather than these outlandish outfits. Everyone looked respectable. Everyone had dignity. Why did it take a national disaster to make an award show tolerable?

I know, I know, I can just change the channel and ignore the whole thing.

Maybe I’ll just do that.

I knew this day would come sooner or later. I’ve been putting it off for a very long time, but it’s time to face the music. I had another visit with the urologist today, which involved a fun little procedure called a cystoscopy! For the faint of heart, you may wish to wait until tomorrow’s tale of merriment…

I had been advised not to urinate for an hour before my appointment, so I could give a “good, healthy” urine sample. As a precaution, I had an extra glass of water with lunch AND a bottle of water while en route to the doctor’s office.

I’m an idiot.

Of course the doctor was running late, and I ended up going in to the exam room about 20 minutes after my reservation. So, while it wasn’t showing on the outside, I was certainly doing the “pee-pee” dance on the inside. And just for the record, someone in that office has a sick sense of humor, because they have a waterfall in the waiting room. When I inquired about it, they informed me it was there to encourage patients to urinate! “Ha ha ha, let’s watch the urology patients try to hold back their urine! Ha ha!”

So I had to go to the bathroom in this computerized toilet that didn’t even have the decency to do a bidet type thing afterwards, then they ran an ultrasound machine over my bladder afterwards to see if I had completely emptied my bladder. I hadn’t. This computerized toilet measured how much I went, how fast and for how long. I was waiting for a “TILT” light to come on, but no such thing happened. “I guess you really had to go! The waterfall did it’s trick!”

So after the fun of super toilet and the ultrasound, I was informed that I was getting the works, which included the cystoscopy to see what the insides of my dink looked like. So there I was, pants down around my ankles with a crowd looking over my personal parts from the inside out. I hadn’t had a crowd look down there since that time in the woods back in 1994! Long story short, I have scar tissue in the urethra (R-E-S-P-E-C-T) again and it has to be removed.

The saga continues in March.

I had the exact surgery 19 years ago, almost to the day, to accomplish the same thing. Apparently the doctor back then didn’t do it right, because the scar tissue came back. The sexy part? After this outpatient surgery I get to go home with a catheter for a week. As uncomfortable and inconvenient that that sounds, I guess I’m glad to be finally correcting this problem after living with it for 30 years or so. Damn that summer day back in the mid 1970s when I rode my bike in to the barn wall, smashing my parts against the handlebars! So I’ll have the surgery on a Thursday, recover Friday through Sunday and then go to work for three days with a catheter and slosh around the office. I can sit at my desk and pee at the same time! How often can you say that about your work day?

Maybe I should just go the studly route and ask for the newest bionics to be installed on my dink.

Having some comp time in the hopper, I decided to take the afternoon off today in preparation for our night at the local casino. I’ve busied myself about the house waiting for Earl to get home from work, repairing my weather station so that I can get reliable readings again (weather info coming to the site soon!) and just goofing off on the internet.

One of the things I started looking at while browsing was penmanship styles. I’ve always been very interested in various penmanship techniques, ever since I was a little kid. I think my various grade school teachers used differing methods of penmanship instruction, because looking at the aforementioned site, I remember being taught all these different styles. No wonder my chicken scratch is somewhat of a mess.

Here’s a sample of what my writing looks like today.

Earl has commented in the past that I write like a girl. Now I don’t think that’s very nice. I’ve seen gay men write much “prettier” than I do so I guess I’m not insulted by his remark. I guess I should be wondering on why I care about such a trivial thing.

Looking at the various penmanship techniques, I wonder what grandparents will write like 60 years from now. My grandparents all had very similar handwriting. They were all undoubtably trained to write with the “Classic Palmer” technique. Now there’s all these different variations of handwriting, plus the encouragement to just do your own thing without regard to the basics. Will today’s kids still use hearts over their “i”‘s when they’re 70?

Anyways, now I’m not going to be able to listen to customers and jot down notes at work anymore with any sense of actually paying attention. I’ll be too busy trying to make my handwriting nice.

I don’t know what my problem is today. I just don’t feel my usually cheery self. I’m trying desperately to get into a good mood, but it’s just not happening. The best I can muster is an “eh”.

I should be happy – Earl is coming home from his business trip tonight, I’m working only half a day tomorrow and then we’re spending the night at the local casino.

This morning at work started a little rough, what with a crazy man walking up the street, purposely blocking my path and taking a swing at me. That was nice. I could hear him babbling as he was walking towards me. I moved left, he moved over into my way as he continued to approached. I moved right, he again moved in front of me, moving closer. I moved left again and he was close enough to yell that he was going to kill me and took a swing. I simply ducked out of the way of his poorly executed haymaker swing and kept walking towards the office. He continued on his way. I love the fact that when they closed the local mental institutions down, they just pushed everybody out on the street. They didn’t try to place them anywhere or give them a headstart. The shooed them away like a stray dog or something. It’s pretty sad when you think about it. Perhaps I’m thinking about it too much and that’s why I’m feeling kind of blah today.

Before the crazy man, I watched a woman who was driving up the main street not move out of the way of the ambulance that was trying to get through. She just kept puttering along, blocking the ambulance’s path. Flashing lights, loud sirens, it didn’t matter. She was the most important thing on the road, fogged up windows, cigarette in left hand, coffee in right, attitude in check. After the ambulance made a turn (still behind her), she proceeded to run two red lights before making a left turn into her assumed place of employment at the State Office building. I wrote down her license plate number. I’m keeping my eye out for her. There’s another driver that I keep my eye out for. She drives a Big Bird Yellow Nissan Xterra. Her license plate says “JANICE”. She has big hair and a lousy attitude. She uses the center turn lane as her private passing lane, ignores traffic lights and frequently double parks in front of the local sub shop during lunch hour. I know I sound snotty, but I hate people like that. I think that’s one of my pet peeves. People that go through life that have absolutely no idea of their surroundings. If people would just keep in mind everything that’s happening outside of their personal space and show a little human decency and respect to others, the world would be a much happier place.

One of my gripes about riding my exercise bike is that I have nothing to do. I look at cinder blocks, cinder blocks and more cinder blocks in the basement, as I sweat away the few calories that manage to fall off my body.

I mentioned a couple of days ago that I was installing Solaris on an old computer in the basement. I originally intended it to be a file server, to store backups of our files off the notebooks, plus anything we chose to save off of TiVo and maybe some Garage Band stuff.

Well Solaris 10 offers a pretty nifty web browser as well.

While not quite as polished as my PowerBook, I am zipping around the internet while working out at the same time. It gives me something better to do instead of counting cinder blocks. I can even program this puppy to make inspirational bionic noises, instead of making the ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch sound with my mouth as I work off the extra poundage I’m carrying on this body of mine. Hey, whatever it takes to inspire oneself, that’s what I say. You should hear me when I’m on a long distance bike ride, doing the Xena battle cry on the hills. I did that when I was riding with the Ride For Missing Children a couple of years ago. Small wonder I ride alone.

Earl is out of town (again), but this time it’s by car instead of plane. Last night I surprised him and met him the airport, even though he had driven himself there and even though its about an hour from the house. We grabbed a bite to eat at the diner after surprising him outside the security gate. It’s not as fun since the whole airport security thing. You used to be able to sit there at the end of the jetway, tear in your eye, song in your heart, smile on your face. But now your loved one has to make the journey through the gate, up the long hallway and through the security exit before they get their little family reunion. Damn those terrorists for fscking it all up.

I’m finding that I type slower when I ride slower, and I type faster as I increase my cadence. I wonder if I can walk and chew gum at the same time. I don’t know that I’ve ever tried, not being much of a gum chewer.

I’ve been on the bike for five minutes, and on my blog for four. Time to take a look around the internet and not try to spend money on ebay.

Not until I’m down to my goal weight at least.