Houston, we have a, well, a sight.

So here I sit in my luxury Hilton Hotel room, eating my room service pizza and watching Sunday night football. There are no kids, so it is quiet. Marcy isn't here, so the thermostat is set at 65 degrees, and I'm considering moving it down to 63 degrees. Do I like to travel? Yes and no. Yes, because of the things above, but no cause I actually miss my family. And, because I like to go into work. I keep caught up on my work and I like my co-workers. The main thing I like about my work trips is, I get to meet the people I normally work with via email and phone, in person. I get to get my hands on my inventory, so I can be certain that all is good in the world. Most people complain about the travel part, but I have been pretty lucky. I did miss a connecting flight in St. Louis once, the last flight to Des Moines for the evening, and had to drive home at 3am. That wasn't fun. I have never lost my luggage, knock on wood, and haven't been bumped and my plane has never crashed. What I have gotten, is entertainment.

My trip started off at the kiosk you now have to use to check in to your flight, since there are only 3 people working in the entire Des Moines airport, they typically focus on fueling up the planes and throwing luggage around. When I got to the kiosk, there was a couple, man and woman, who were traveling together, but were each at a different kiosk. I waited as they struggled to figure it out. I was about to push them out of the way, but the lady finally gave up and let me go, while the guy raised his hand like he was in kindergarten and the teacher was going to ask him what he needed. I checked my bag and got the heck out of there before he started looking over my shoulder to see how to work the dang thing. DON'T CHEAT! Figure it out on your own. I got up to security, which in Des Moines, is typically a 10 to 20 minute process, but usually 10. They only had one line open so we were headed for a 20 minute line, when a miracle happened, they opened a second line. Wow, that was a first. The people in front of me poured to the new line, so when it came to me, I had to decide, move to the new line or stick with the old one. I chose old one. Wrong choice. Not because the line was slow, but the lady in front of me was showing me parts of her anatomy I didn't need to see. When I got into the line, she was wearing a coat, like a suit coat. I was busy taking my shoes off when she removed the coat, so I missed the tease part of the strip tease. When I looked up, I saw that this lady, who was a bit overweight, had removed the coat and was wearing a "shirt" that didn't have a back. It had like straps that were holding it "closed" but there was a ton of skin. How do I say this? She had back boobs. I hope I'm not breaking any news to you, but if you get overweight, you can develop boobs, on your back. They aren't real boobs, so I don't think she was breaking any laws, but wow, that is a shocker to look up to. Who the hell wears a shirt with no back, let alone on a plane? People watching is my favorite thing to do at an airport. What people choose to wear, fascinates me.

My flight is on time, so we board. I have to almost crawl to get in this tiny plane, but I find my seat and sit down, just as my window mate shows up so I have to get back up and bang my head on the roof again. Flight takes off, seat belt light goes off and my seat mate has to pee. I let him out, cram my legs back into my seat and wait for him to get back. I pry myself out of the seat to allow him back in, then squeeze back into my seat. About 10 minutes later, he decides he needs something out of the overhead, so we go through the routine again. It's a 2 hour flight dude, get the shit you need and sit down. No upsie downsie. The other problem with these tiny planes, the dude next to me was about my height, so we played footsie all the way to Houston and his hairy ass arm was hogging the arm rest. This plane has 2 seats on one side and one seat on the other. I try to get the one seat whenever I can, but couldn't on this trip. On my flight back, I have the single seat.

Before you take off, the flight attendant always gives you the safety speech. I stopped listening to it years ago. I think I know what to do. If the mask drops, scream "we are all going to die," remove your seat belt and proceed to run up and down the aisle ripping all the masks out. I might have mis-understood the directions, but that is the gist of it. I'm not listening to the lady today, but out of the corner of my ear (is that a saying?) I thought I heard her say something about asparagus. Surely she didn't, but maybe she was trying to see if ANYONE was listening. There was no reaction from the rest of the plane, so she either didn't say it, or nobody was listening.

When I travel, I try to dress to be comfortable. I watched a show years ago that said you should always wear long pants and tennis shoes on planes. The long pants protect your legs if there is an accident and the tennis shoes so you can do wind sprints on the movable sidewalk that is in so many airports now. OK, that isn't right, it's actually because a sandal exposes your toes, if there is an accident, and flip flops can come off and if you have to run over fiery wreckage once you have been de-flip flopped, it can hurt. All of this is to cover your ass on a worse case scenario, but jeans and tennis shoes is how I want to dress anyway. Since the weather in Houston is in the 90's, I wore short sleeves. I also don't get could easily, so I'm usually good. A lady who sat two rows up from me, apparently, doesn't have the same temperature tolerance that I do. She was wearing a stocking cap that looked like one of those sock monkeys. It was pulled down over her ears and it was hilarious. Looked like she was heading to Alaska in February.

When we got to Houston, I was waiting for my luggage when I watched a guy grab a suitcase and moved it a bit, so he could get the handle of his suitcase. A guy right behind him, angerly told him not to touch his suitcase, seeing as the case that guy one touched, was guy two's. It seemed a little harsh, seeing as how guy one didn't chuck the case across the airport, he barely moved it. I guess travel makes some people a bit edgy.

I had a little luck on my side as well. I was standing in line for a cab to go to the hotel, when a van pulled up with one of those scrolleing message boards on the side that listed my hotel. I knew my hotel had a shuttle, but when I tried to call from the booth, I sat on the phone for 5 minutes and nobody ever picked up. I decided to take a cab, until this little miracle pulled up. I checked with the guy, he said he did go to my hotel, so I skipped the long taxi line. I'm glad I was able to find the shuttle, my hotel was farther than I thought and it saved my company some money.

All in all, a good trip. I'm off to my warehouse in the morning and will probably sweat like crazy in the 90 degree, un-airconditioned, Texas warehouse, so wish me luck.

Random pictures, hilarious comments

I always new there was a reason I had three kids. Now don't get me wrong, I love the them, but normally, they spend most of their days at home making messes. Their idea of cleaning them up, isn't on the same scale as mine, but they try, sort of. The reason I had kids? So someday, they can do the jobs around the house that I don't really want to do. That is why my parents had me, but as a kid, I never really appreciated all that they did, so I never quite got the whole having kids thing. I thought they were lazy, turns out they were just smart. My kids aren't very old, but they are just old enough to think helping daddy around the house is fun. I'll milk this until they are fully trained, then BAM! it's their job. My plan is moving along just swell. Here is Makiah mowing the grass.

You can see that he appears to be struggling, which he was. I keep cheering him on, and pulling the mower back into line. It seems that when you push with all your might, you tend to lean to your strong side. The lines in the yard aren't exactly straight, but if you look closely, half of the grass is dormant, so whatever. I didn't take very good care of the grass this year, so it's a bit weedy and a lot dry. Hey, Iowa is the Alaskan tundra in the winter and the Arizona desert in the summer. Just so Makiah didn't feel like he was having all the fun, I had Max working as well.

This is our pool, that he is power washing the mud off the bottom so I can roll it up and put it in the garage for the winter. Then, next spring, I will roll it back out and spend several hours looking for holes that happened when we power washed it and rolled it up. WTF! Mason hasn't exactly jumped on the bandwagon yet, but I'm dreaming up some jobs for him.

I found this picture from earlier this summer.

Now this picture cracks me up. Mason is holding my BB pistol and Makiah is holding my Red Ryder, single pump, BB rifle, the same gun from A Christmas Story. I have not shot my eye out, but the kids will at some point and Marcy will give me the "I told you so" speech. Bring it. I'm working with them on gun safety, with guns that probably won't kill them if they break a rule. Since both guns are single pump, that means two things. One, they can't pump either one of them, so I have to do it, so I always know when we are live. Two, since they are both single pump, not a lot of power. We shoot cans in the backyard, with my wood privacy fence behind the cans to stop the strays. The first time we ever shot them, two summers ago, Makiah was a dead eye. He hit the cans with every pull of the trigger. The cans were about 30 feet away, so not bad for his first attempt. This year, his eye is no longer dead. We could have thrown a handful of BB's and had the same result. Oh well, they haven't shot me or each other, or an animal, so we are good.

I found this shot that I took as I passed a car on the way home.

If you see that white dot, just to the bottom left of the gas door, that is her gas cap dangling there. Not sure why I thought this was funny but I did, and do. Maybe because I have never done it. I never lost a gas cap, when they weren't attached, back in the day. Now that I've said that, this will happen to me. There appears to be something under the wheel as well, but I'm not sure what it was. I would have gotten a better look, but I hadn't looked at the road in a few minutes trying to get this shot, so I thought I might take a gander at where I was in the traffic. Safety first.

Another shot happened near my office.

This is probably hard to see, but it is burned into my brain, so let me describe. This truck is all decked out. It has the huge CB antenna. It has large wheels. It has fricking smoke stacks on both sides of the cab. It sounds like across between a Harley motorcycle and a funny car. A deep rumble. Then, to top it off, it has a Rascal Scooter strapped to the back. Hilarious. At least if his truck breaks down, he can continue his trip and a whopping 3 1/2 mph.

And finally, I took this picture on my last trip to White Castle and was going to sign off my last post about the WC with it. Well I forgot, so let me sign off this post, with a very sad shot.

That was close!

Have you ever had something that shook you, and I mean shook you to your core? Well I had that happen to me last Sunday. Marcy works with a lady who lives on an apple orchard. They have about 1000 trees on their property, but don't pick or sell the apples. I got the impression that they have a lot of family and friends that come out and pick them, but they must leave a bunch that just don't get eaten. It was Sunday morning, and we decided to head to the orchard to pick some. Now the weather outside was frightful, OK, not frightful but as I was typing the first part of that sentence, the song just jumped in. It was a cloudy day, appeared to want to rain, but we were determined to get a bunch of apples, the rain be damned. We found the orchard, about 10 minutes from our house, and hit the trees to get our bounty. It started to sprinkle, but what I've always tried to teach the boys is, a little rain won't hurt you, it's the lightning that will sting a bit. There were apples every where. I tried to convince the boys, that just because the apples were low enough on the tree that they could reach them, didn't mean they needed to be picked. The first bunch of apples picked were the size of golf balls. I reminded them, the bigger the better. (glad I said it and not Marcy) They started passing on the golf balls, and started picking reasonable apples. Then we went over the condition of the apple. "Don't put an apple that is half rotten in with the other apples," I said. All three boys had either a bag or bucket to carry their treasure, and they were starting to fill up, well, some were. After walking around for about 15 minutes, I noticed that Mason had one lonely apple in his bag. I asked him why he only had one, and he said it was perfect, and he was only picking perfect apples. I wished him luck. The friend of Marcy's said that there were bigger apples on the other side of the road, so we headed over there, and she was right. As we crossed the road, the rain picked up. We were all ready soaked, so why stop now. After just a few minutes looking for bigger apples, it happened. My memory is a little foggy, but what I remember is a flash of light. Not from a flashlight, or from a camera, but more like the sun just landed in a farm field in Iowa. It was bright. That scared me, but the BOOM that followed just about cause my bowels to release. To say I was startled, would be an understatement. Like saying Katrina was a big storm, yeah, no shit. As soon as the boom happened, I knew that lightning had just struck nearby. My first reaction? RUN!!!! I yelled to the kids, who were now all crying, RUN!!!!!! And they did, but the little bastards dropped their apples, so I yelled to get your apples. Looking back, was that wrong? Should I have nearly sacrificed one of my offspring so I could pack an apple in my lunch? Huh, maybe, but at the time, "Get your apples." They took their hands off of the ears just long enough to pick up their apple bags in their now shaking hands, and run, still crying, to the van. Now my sprint, which wouldn't exactly be one for the books, consisted of a 6 foot 4 inch, slightly over weight, 42 year old, slightly frightened man, running at full speed, bent at the waist to get under the branches and trying not to turn an ankle on all of the previously fallen apples. I was doing my best to get around the trees and not running into one of my kids and knocking him down in his terrified state, loosing any chance of father of the year. BUT, they were on their own. I can't run my 6 foot 4 inch, slightly over weight, 42 year old, slightly frightened body, running at full speed, bent at the waist to get under the branches and trying not to turn an ankle on all of the previously fallen apples AND carry a crying 5 or 9 year old. Mason was at the van, so one kid was safe. Marcy was running at my left, van to my right, so her chances of beating me to the van were next to zero. I love her, but I'm not above smashing her to the ground so I get my butt into the van before the next lightning strike. I knew I had a little time, but mother nature has no rules on the amount of time between strikes, so I wasn't going to rely on history. I'm happy to say that we all made it to the van and I didn't have to sacrifice any kid or my wife, to be safe. We drove up to the house, and were greeted by Marcy's friend and her daughters, who had been riding a four wheeler around when the strike happened. The pointed out where it had struck, since they had a front row seat to the actual landing zone. It appears the strike hit about 300 yards from where there are now 4 or 5 pee stains. A little too close for comfort. As a storm rolled in today, Makiah was in the house at the first flash of light. I think he has a new respect.