Create Every Day

Got up this morning and had me a breakfast of champions:

Homer Simpson eat your heart out

What can I say?  Sometimes you just need a big ol’ plate of donuts.  And a nice cup of hot coffee — black and bitter, of course — rounds out the powdered sugar sweetness nicely.

Now there’s nothing left but to curl up on the couch and veg out on the Internet for a few hours.

Perfect.

I just found out that they up and changed the zodiac on me. Dang… now I’m gonna have to rearrange all my furniture again.

I’m usually not one for good luck charms, but after a long first day of a two-week business trip it’s hard to argue with this:

Confucius Say...

I can only hope.

“Would you like to purchase any snacks or sandwiches today?” the stewardess asks.  (Erm… air hostess… no wait… flight attendant.  Right, we’re using the neutered flight attendant now.  Silliness.  Anyway, this was a lady, but that’s irrelevant.)

Starting again…

“Would you like to purchase any snacks or sandwiches today?” the flight attendant asks.

My stomach rumbles ominously.  I haven’t had anything today but a Jimmy Dean D-Lights diet breakfast sandwich and a banana.

“Yeah, I’ll have the sandwich.”

She passes over a pathetic, plastic-wrapped sandwich and a small bag of chips.

“That’ll be ten dollars.”

I resist a sudden urge to hand the sandwich and small bag of chips right back.  But I don’t.  My stomach has told me in no uncertain terms that doing that would be a bad idea.  Picking a fight with a large, bald, tattooed man in a bar bad.  So I pass over my credit card, resisting the urge to grind my teeth.

I look over the meager fare with disgust as the attendant fiddles with her little card reading machine.  You’d think the airline could spot me a dang sandwich for a four and a half hour flight.

“Thank you!”

I mumble something that could be interpreted as polite as I return my abused card to the dubious safety of my wallet.

The attendant moves on to the next row, doing a valiant job of pretending to ignoring her memories of the days when passengers looked forward to flying.  When a flight came with a meal, a smile, a pillow, and even — if you asked for them — a deck of cards.  When the only people that carried roller-bags onto the plane were on business, and the only reason they didn’t check bags was because they were far too busy to bother with waiting at the baggage claim.  When flying wasn’t a chore, but an adventure.

I don’t envy her.  Hers is a hateful job now.

I turn back to stare at my sandwich and small bag of chips.  But I don’t eat yet.  The drink cart spends another fifteen minutes making its slow trudge down the isle before it reaches us.

Service — at least that at thirty thousand feet — is dead in America.

Don’t mess with me… I’m conjugating.

–Dore, on using Rosetta Stone for the first time.

Overheard while Dore and I rode the Portland MAX light-rail to the airport this morning:

Train operator: “Folks, I’ve got no heat here in my cabin, so I’m going to try turning the train off for a second to see if it will reboot.”

[The lights shut off for a second, then come back on.  The electronic displays in the coach start showing a self-check sequence.]

Passenger: “If it comes up with Windows I’m getting off.”