ABCDEFG Meme
A - Age: 35
B - Band listening to right now: Evanescence
C - Career future: University/college prof and research
D - Dad's name: Michael
E - Easiest person to talk to: Anita
F - Favorite song: Gads, I can only pick one? Sorry, can't do it.
G - Gummy Bears or Gummy Worms: Bears
H - Hometown: Grew up in Buhler, KS -- population ~1000 not counting livestock!
I - Instruments: Sadly, none.
J - Job: Graduate student/research assistant
K - Kids: No human ones, thank the Higher. We don't need no copies of me!!
L - Longest car ride ever: The trip to New Orleans in August over two days would qualify as the longest in MILES. The trip several years ago back to Wichita from Houston with a moronic, hateful bitch of a personal care attendant would qualify as the longest test of EMOTIONAL endurance.
M - Mom's name: Cindy
N - Number of Nieces & Nephews: Biological = 0. Adopted = 1 niece.
P - Phobia[s]: Spiders and not being able to move my arms when I wake up -- the latter being the worst. I will have a panic attack of clinical proportions with the latter.
Q - Quote: Groovy.
R - Reason to smile: Reba greeting me at the door when I come home.
S - Song you sang last: Ummmm, dunno. I could sing you BB King's "The Thrill is Gone" right now if'n ya want.
T - Time you wake up: In New Orleans, anywhere between 0645 and 0745, depending on whether it's a bath day (earlier rising) or not (later).
U - Unknown fact about me: I once sang a song in "very fine" Italian, according to my voice coach. I don't even speak Italian.
V - Vegetable you hate: Brussels sprouts. But I like cabbage. Go figure.
W - Worst habit: Procrastinator extraordinaire!!
X - X-rays you've had: I have muscular dystrophy and am the most accident-prone person I know after my father . . . name me a body part I HAVEN'T had x-rayed!!
Y - Yummy food: Shrimp. You can boil it, you can fry it, you can grill it . . . .
Z - Zodiac sign: Leo/Virgo
Book Meme -- because I was tagged
1. Grab the book closest to you.
2. Open to page 123, go down to the fifth sentence
3. Post the text of next 3 sentences on your blog
4. Name of the book and the author
5. Tag three people
From Sherlock Holmes and the Rune Stone Mystery by Larry Millett (not the book I am currently reading, but the one that was closest to me):
So many questions asked at once seemed to confuse Fogelblad, who stared down at the floor and said quietly: "I do not know. That is the truth."
Rafferty now moved abruptly to another line of questioning, a technique which Holmes himself often used to great effect during interrogations.
Kim, Suz, Jen W. -- Tag! You're It! You can post in comments, K.
Sunday, December 31, 2006
Tuesday, December 12, 2006
Fun with planes
The way it was supposed to be
I would get to the airport, check my suitcase at the curb, go straight to security (because I had printed my boarding pass at home), and get on my plane. We would take off at 1:30, we would arrive in Houston approximately an hour later, I would have about an hour to make my connecting flight, and I would land in Wichita a little after 5:30.
The way it actually happened
The skycaps insisted that I had to check my suitcase inside the terminal because of my dog. "It's regulation, ma'am" -- a regulation I have never encountered before because, as you may also argue, my dog has nothing to do with my suitcase. I go into the terminal and proceed to check my suitcase, and I ask the man about this new regulation only to be informed that no such regulation exists. ::sigh:: What the hell?
I breeze through security after a reasonably thorough check of both myself and my dog. Two points of interest: (1) Does it really take three people to check a gimp and her dog? (2) They didn't check underneath my chair. Swabbed my pouch that was obviously full of nothing but pens, but didn't check the bottom of my chair. If you're going to go to the trouble to feel all around and inside my dog's ears, check the whole chair, peeps.
Got no grief about my wheelchair's batteries, which was a relief, and had competent people help me with the transfers. AJ the sweet and adorably-gay flight attendant helped me get comfortable in my seat after minding Reba during the transfers.
We took off from NOLA fifteen minutes late because of rainshowers in Houston, and we wound up circling for another twenty minutes for the same reason before being permitted to land. That, coupled with the fact that I sent people on an unnecessary search for my not-missing-afterall batteries, meant I missed my connection to Wichita. Truth be told, I would've missed the flight without the wheelchair drama. A Continental assistant showed me the way to customer service after a nice hug and a "happy holidays" from AJ. I was wishing for another AJ hug after I found out that there wasn't another direct flight to ICT until 9:20, and even more STILL after I called Mom to tell her I wouldn't be in until 11:01 and she told me she had to get up at 4:30 to go to work. Max the sweet Continental guy found the same female attendant who had helped me off the plane to have her help me situate more comfortably in my chair (I hadn't worried about it previously because I thought I was getting on another plane shortly), then he gave me $12 in food vouchers (which he was not obligated to do because it wasn't Continental's fault that Houston had shite-y weather) and urged me to go get something to eat. After, he said, come back here and he'd make sure I knew how to get to my other terminal. I was grateful for that last because I haven't been through IAH many times and thus get pretty directionally challenged.
I ate a tasty taco with yummy spicy salsa (you're in Houston, kid, no wimpy salsa here) and stuffed a giant chocolate chip cookie and a giant brownie in my bag. My taco was a few cents over one $4 voucher, and they don't give change, so rather than dig my wallet out of my densely packed bookbag, I bought the cookie and brownie, too. Max took Reba outside for me so I wouldn't have to go back through security, then he personally escorted me to B terminal where he left me with another $8 in food vouchers and chatting with a really sweet girl from NY on her way to Colorado Springs. After she boarded her plane, I ate some enchiladas (which weren't all that good and nowhere near the caliber of E terminal's taco) and started wandering. I made a couple circuits through a bookstore and managed to buy nothing -- amazing considering that they had both Stephen King's AND Michael Crichton's new books, not so amazing because the only reason I didn't buy at least ONE as a consolation to myself was because there really was no room in my bag to put them. I used the last of my vouchers to buy some chocolate-covered raisins. I went with the raisins rather than the almonds because I knew Dad would want to dip into them when I got home, and he doesn't like almonds.
I took my raisins and my collection of Laurell K. Hamilton short stories and esconced myself at an eatery table to fritter away two and a half more hours. I had just finished reading the second story and was contemplating reading another or wandering some more when a reasonably good-looking fellow sat down a little way from me and struck up a conversation. I spent the next hour talking to the oil platform repair diver from "somewhere between Liverpool and Manchester. You've heard of them, yeah?" He was on his way to the GoM via Lafayette to work for a month on a platform damaged by Katrina. Then, he said, he was going to take an extra couple of weeks to go visit a friend in Irvine, CA, because "I've always wanted to go to Disneyland." That made me giggle -- tough, buff, Brit diver all excited about Disneyland. He told me about places he's been and how they differ from what you see on the news or read about (he'd just gotten back from Russia, and had spent time in Saudi Arabia, Dubai, Thailand, Singapore, and off the Iran/Iraq coast), and even advised that if I really wanted a challenge in conservation biology to go to Bombay ("I've seen a lot, but even I was stooned to see what they poot in their water").
Alas, soon we both had to head to our respective planes. We landed in ICT ten minutes early, and the plane crew folks had an interesting time getting my chair up to me. Mom wound up going down the jetway and doing it for them ("Take off the clutches like this sign she posted on the chair specifically to help you says rather than trying to manhandle it with the clutches on."). I gratefully went to the bathroom while Dad got my suitcase (somehow it managed to get to ICT in spite of all the plane drama), and we headed home.
And today . . . I've been a total freaking bum. And my mommy's making me homemade pizza for supper tonight. Yes, I'm spoiled.
I would get to the airport, check my suitcase at the curb, go straight to security (because I had printed my boarding pass at home), and get on my plane. We would take off at 1:30, we would arrive in Houston approximately an hour later, I would have about an hour to make my connecting flight, and I would land in Wichita a little after 5:30.
The way it actually happened
The skycaps insisted that I had to check my suitcase inside the terminal because of my dog. "It's regulation, ma'am" -- a regulation I have never encountered before because, as you may also argue, my dog has nothing to do with my suitcase. I go into the terminal and proceed to check my suitcase, and I ask the man about this new regulation only to be informed that no such regulation exists. ::sigh:: What the hell?
I breeze through security after a reasonably thorough check of both myself and my dog. Two points of interest: (1) Does it really take three people to check a gimp and her dog? (2) They didn't check underneath my chair. Swabbed my pouch that was obviously full of nothing but pens, but didn't check the bottom of my chair. If you're going to go to the trouble to feel all around and inside my dog's ears, check the whole chair, peeps.
Got no grief about my wheelchair's batteries, which was a relief, and had competent people help me with the transfers. AJ the sweet and adorably-gay flight attendant helped me get comfortable in my seat after minding Reba during the transfers.
We took off from NOLA fifteen minutes late because of rainshowers in Houston, and we wound up circling for another twenty minutes for the same reason before being permitted to land. That, coupled with the fact that I sent people on an unnecessary search for my not-missing-afterall batteries, meant I missed my connection to Wichita. Truth be told, I would've missed the flight without the wheelchair drama. A Continental assistant showed me the way to customer service after a nice hug and a "happy holidays" from AJ. I was wishing for another AJ hug after I found out that there wasn't another direct flight to ICT until 9:20, and even more STILL after I called Mom to tell her I wouldn't be in until 11:01 and she told me she had to get up at 4:30 to go to work. Max the sweet Continental guy found the same female attendant who had helped me off the plane to have her help me situate more comfortably in my chair (I hadn't worried about it previously because I thought I was getting on another plane shortly), then he gave me $12 in food vouchers (which he was not obligated to do because it wasn't Continental's fault that Houston had shite-y weather) and urged me to go get something to eat. After, he said, come back here and he'd make sure I knew how to get to my other terminal. I was grateful for that last because I haven't been through IAH many times and thus get pretty directionally challenged.
I ate a tasty taco with yummy spicy salsa (you're in Houston, kid, no wimpy salsa here) and stuffed a giant chocolate chip cookie and a giant brownie in my bag. My taco was a few cents over one $4 voucher, and they don't give change, so rather than dig my wallet out of my densely packed bookbag, I bought the cookie and brownie, too. Max took Reba outside for me so I wouldn't have to go back through security, then he personally escorted me to B terminal where he left me with another $8 in food vouchers and chatting with a really sweet girl from NY on her way to Colorado Springs. After she boarded her plane, I ate some enchiladas (which weren't all that good and nowhere near the caliber of E terminal's taco) and started wandering. I made a couple circuits through a bookstore and managed to buy nothing -- amazing considering that they had both Stephen King's AND Michael Crichton's new books, not so amazing because the only reason I didn't buy at least ONE as a consolation to myself was because there really was no room in my bag to put them. I used the last of my vouchers to buy some chocolate-covered raisins. I went with the raisins rather than the almonds because I knew Dad would want to dip into them when I got home, and he doesn't like almonds.
I took my raisins and my collection of Laurell K. Hamilton short stories and esconced myself at an eatery table to fritter away two and a half more hours. I had just finished reading the second story and was contemplating reading another or wandering some more when a reasonably good-looking fellow sat down a little way from me and struck up a conversation. I spent the next hour talking to the oil platform repair diver from "somewhere between Liverpool and Manchester. You've heard of them, yeah?" He was on his way to the GoM via Lafayette to work for a month on a platform damaged by Katrina. Then, he said, he was going to take an extra couple of weeks to go visit a friend in Irvine, CA, because "I've always wanted to go to Disneyland." That made me giggle -- tough, buff, Brit diver all excited about Disneyland. He told me about places he's been and how they differ from what you see on the news or read about (he'd just gotten back from Russia, and had spent time in Saudi Arabia, Dubai, Thailand, Singapore, and off the Iran/Iraq coast), and even advised that if I really wanted a challenge in conservation biology to go to Bombay ("I've seen a lot, but even I was stooned to see what they poot in their water").
Alas, soon we both had to head to our respective planes. We landed in ICT ten minutes early, and the plane crew folks had an interesting time getting my chair up to me. Mom wound up going down the jetway and doing it for them ("Take off the clutches like this sign she posted on the chair specifically to help you says rather than trying to manhandle it with the clutches on."). I gratefully went to the bathroom while Dad got my suitcase (somehow it managed to get to ICT in spite of all the plane drama), and we headed home.
And today . . . I've been a total freaking bum. And my mommy's making me homemade pizza for supper tonight. Yes, I'm spoiled.
Thursday, December 07, 2006
I might actually start going to Hard Rock . . .
. . . unless NOLA's Hard Rock Cafe is considered west of the Mississippi (it curves so much, I get confused), then screw the white man. Hurray for the Seminole tribe!
Wednesday, December 06, 2006
So what do you do when the semester and your stats final are over?
You kick back with the officemates, opening Christmas presents and drinking hot cocoa laced with Bailey's chocolate mint Irish cream while listening to New Orleans Christmas carols like "Norris the Nocturnal Nutria" and "Oh, Little Town of Destrahan."
In the office.
Good times.
In the office.
Good times.