Morning All:

Dark

The only likeable piece of this morning is the dark coffee. For the rest, outside it’s still dark, and the whole weekend promises to be dark, damp and dreary. Really not much to look forward to. The one bright spot is that tonight it’s the first game for Kiwiplan’s indoor Soccer season. Adrianne plays and she adds that extra spark, I’ll be cheering.

Delight

The physical tickets for the Tall Stacks event next October arrived. A large packet with 18 folders each containing the enamel passport pins and lots of brochures – but no dinner tickets. “Well” I thought to myself, “possibly we are to use the receipt letter containing the confirmation number details as our dinner ticket”. Anyway it was something I felt I should check out. The very next day Marcia called excitedly. Retrieving the normal mail delivery from the mailbox she happened on a small stack of 18 tickets and a post-it note paper-clipped to it. It was from our Mailman (same as Mailperson for all you politically correct ones) explaining that he found these laying about when he came to the end of his route and remembered the packet from Tall Stacks arriving at our house. $1200 worth of tickets with no identifier on them received only through the diligence of one USP employee – neither rain nor sleet nor gloom of dark………etc. I can see a substantial tip coming in someone’s near future – he will be delighted.

Dread

Wasn’t’t it horrific weather last Sunday evening – tornadoes from Toledo down to Alabama? I had made the decision to fly late Sunday afternoon into Newark, NJ from Dayton. Leaving the house at 3 showed nothing about any nasty weather. Once in the airport it became a different story with one continuing delay after another each ending in cancellation. At some point I had to go back out through security to get rebooked from AA to Delta. Coming back through security I set off the alarm and discovered that buried underneath my wallet was my little miniature Leatherman tool. Like flies on dung the newly improved screening force descended on me. It took a bit but they finally allowed me to leave security under escort and take the offending “weapon” out to the car. I paid a bored taxi driver $5 to swing me and my baggage through long-term parking and the nearly horizontal rain and lightning to the car and then back to the terminal. Finally, through Atlanta and into LaGuardia, NY (since I had missed the last flight into Newark) I arrived. Long story short, after driving across Manhattan I walked into my hotel room at 3:03 AM. For safety I placed a wake-up call for 6:30 and then for 6:45 – the week had started. Reading the Monday papers, my week was starting just fine compared to the hundreds of others whose lives were devastated by the storms.

Have a great week.