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Catching up a bit since it’s been forever since I’ve updated here.  Facebook has really put a dent in my blogging…  Anyway, so we returned from our cruise last Sunday.  We travelled on Holland America and I don’t think I would go with them again.  The service on the ship was only so-so, which doesn’t cut it when you expect really top notch service.  Also, the ship had a lot of technical problems with the evaporators (which apparently make water on board) and one of the engines; so much so that they cancelled the stop in Key West, a place we were really hoping to see, and cut short our stop in Costa Maya, Mexico.  We did stop in Cozumel, Mexico, which they added in place of Key West as well as our planned stops in Belize and Guatemala.

Mostly, it was great to spend time with Beth and the kids and my parents and Beth’s mom.  I’ve got a ton of photos, but not all of them are on my computer yet.  Here are a couple:

 

This is all of us at dinner on the ship.  I have no idea why I look so surprised.

 

This is us (minus Beth’s mom, who stayed aboard ship) at the Mayan ruins at Chacchoben, near Costa Maya:

Here are Owen and Nicole’s 2009 school and Sharks football/cheerleading photos:

 

And because I’m not sure I posted it before, here is the photo with Owen’s team right before our last game of the season:

Here is Nicole's big performance from this morning. She is the second in line at the beginning and the one being lifted in the air at the end.

This morning just before our last football game of the season, I finally got my photo with the team:

We played a pretty good game, overall.  At first, the offense struggled, but we pulled it together.  Owen had a chance to save the game, with a big tackle.  He was all alone with the ball carrier in the backfield, but he went up high instead of going low (like we teach) and the player slipped out of his grasp and ran for a touchdown.  That tied the game, which is how it ended.  Still, it was a beautiful morning, perfect for football (sunny and in the mid-80s) and a great end to a great season.

(By the way, Owen is in the middle row above, second from the right, wearing number 28.  I’m directly behind him.)

Here are a couple of photos taken of Nicole doing her thing with the cheer squad on the sidelines:

 

Now that the season is over, I have no idea what I’ll do with all the free time!

Beth’s mom bought me something very cool last weekend: The Beertender!  Do you remember way back when, the late night commercials for a gadget called the Beermeister?  It was a fridge in which you put a keg of beer and it had a tap on the top of it.  The Beertender is a similar, though smaller, gadget.

You start with a 5-liter DraughtKeg of Heineken or Heineken Light.  Here is one that I bought, currently sitting in the Man-Fridge out in the garage:

 

You can, of course, tap the DraughtKegs directly, but they won’t keep for very long.  Therefore, we have the Beertender!

 

It keeps the beer cold and carbonated for up to 30 days from tapping the keg.  And, of course, it makes it easy to pour a nice cold one.  Unfortunately, the only DraughtKegs currently available are Heineken and Heineken Light, but they’re both decent beers and maybe eventually other beers will become available.

Here’s the Beertender with the top open, showing the keg inside:

 

I’ve got mine sitting in the dining room, on top of my electric wine cellar.  Pretty convenient, don’t you think?

 

Our dining room is actually our booze-room, with the Beertender, wine cellar, and our bar in there:

 

Actually, the bar looks much better when it’s open:

 

And my best bottle of hooch is my 19-year-old bottle of Glenlivet single-malt:

 

One of these days I’ll crack it open for a special occasion.

I thought I’d tell the tale of my trip home that started on Friday, because it was one of the worst flying experiences I’ve had.  Sadly, almost none of it needed to be so lousy were it not for a mix of random unfortunate circumstances and truly awful airline employees.  I had flown up to Buffalo earlier in the week for some meetings and I since Delta (with whom I usually fly) didn’t have any seats available at convenient times for my return trip, I thought I’d give US Airways a try.  That was a HUGE mistake and one I won’t make again.

Friday evening I was on a small Embraer 170 jet that departed from Buffalo for Washington DC.  I had about an hour in DC to catch my connecting flight to Tampa and I’d get home about midnight, which was important because on Saturday morning at 7:00 Owen’s football team, which I coach, had their team photos for the year followed by a game.

About five minutes after take-off, however, the pilots reduced thrust and started descending.  I knew something was up but they didn’t announce anything for a few more minutes.  When they finally said we had a problem and were returning to Buffalo to land, I figured then I’d probably not make my original connection in DC.  We made an emergency landing and stopped hard on the runway itself, rather than taxiing back to a gate.  The plane was surrounded by large fire engines, six by my count, and assorted smaller fire and police vehicles.  Several firemen began to inspect the plane and we sat there for a good 15-20 minutes while they did so.  Finally, they cleared the plane to return the gate.

The pilots announced that one of the fire detection sensors in the cargo hold was showing an error of some kind and that was the reason for the emergency landing.  They didn’t believe that there was an actual fire, but with the sensor not working, there was no way to know for sure, and we couldn’t continue to DC like that.  A ground agent came on and started announcing cities to which passengers were not going to make their connections.  Tampa was about the third or fourth one listed.  Those passengers were told to take their belongs and get off of the plane.  The gate agent announced that nobody should worry, he would not let anyone go anywhere where they would not be able to make their connection and that he was personally “watching out for us”.  We never saw him again.

They had us exit the airside of the airport and go back to the ticket desk.  This is where the real fun began.  The Embraer was a fairly small plane and only some of the passengers were pulled off for rebooking, maybe 20 or so.  You’d think it would have been a quick and painless process to find us some other flights for the evening.  Apparently not for the horrible, bitter, and generally useless ticket agents.  These people were visibly angry with the passengers!  I guess requiring rebooking because of their mechanical problems was somehow our fault and a major disruption for them.

There were four agents to start with, but quickly there were only only three.  One of them almost immediately grabbed his cell phone from the counter and walked quickly out the front doors of the airport and was gone.  Still, three agents for 20 passengers ought to have been enough, one would have thought.

In the small group, a surprising number of us were trying to get to Tampa that night.  None of us did.  I stood in the short line for at least 30 minutes, perhaps longer, before getting “helped” (and I use that term very loosely) by a surly agent.  It’s hard to describe just how horrible this particular agent one, but let me give you an example.

While we were in line, there were a few other passengers looking to check in to other flights.  So those of us waiting for agents let them go ahead of us and use the automated kiosks to check in to their flights.  While I was first in line, I let a young girl go ahead of me and she apparently had a problem with the kiosk and needed help from an agent.  All of the agents proceeded to ignore her completely as she tried to speak to them.  Most wouldn’t even make eye contact with her and none would deign to speak to her.  This lasted for at 10-15 minutes.  Finally the agent in front of me was free and this girl tried to get the agent to help her.  Since I had already let her go ahead of me, I didn’t complain.  But the agent refused to help the girl at all.  She said that the “30 minutes before departure time” rule for her flight had passed and it was to late to check in.  Never mind that the girl had been there well before that time, but had been ignored by the agents to that point.  As the poor girl burst into tears at not being allowed on her flight, the uncaring agent simply dismissed her and called me up to the counter.  I have no idea what became of the girl.

When I got to the counter and asked her (politely) to please find me a way to get to Tampa by 7:00 a.m. the next morning, she just shook her head.   I tried to explain why, but she didn’t want to hear it.  I’m sure she’s heard plenty of sob stories from plenty of passengers trying to get somewhere and it was clear she didn’t give a damn.

The agent next to her didn’t either.  As she finished with one passenger, instead of helping the next one who had stepped up to the counter, she barked, “I didn’t call you up to the counter!” and told my agent she was leaving.

I couldn’t believe my ears and I spoke up.

 

Me: You’re leaving?!?

Her: I’ve been here since [whenever] and I need to get home.

Me: Ma’am, we’re ALL trying to get home tonight!

Her: But I have to be back here in the morning.

Me: It looks like we’re ALL going to be back here in the morning.

 

And then she left.  And so did the supervisor who had been working with another passenger.  According to my agent, who responded when several people in line asked where the other two were going, the supervisor had to “check out” the other agent.  I have no idea why and about 10 minutes later the supervisor came back.  But now there were two.  And nobody was getting on any flights that night.  From what I could tell, not one single passenger was found another flight.

I was given a flight for the next morning and a voucher for a cheap hotel across the street and a $10 voucher for dinner and $5 for breakfast, both of which really are only accepted at the airport.  But there is no food at this airport without passing through security, which I could no longer do without a boarding pass for a flight that night.

Before I left the agent, I asked if I had been booked into first class for my flights, since I had previously been booked in first for my flight out of DC.  She said that I had since those were the only seats left.  “Both flights?” I asked.  “Yes,” she said.  She lied!  But more on that in a moment.

I caught a shuttle to the hotel, the misnamed Quality Inn.  They had no food available, so I took a walk.  It was raining out and very cold, but I walked about a half mile to a Tim Horton’s for a sandwich and then to a gas station for a large beer.  I was fairly wet by the time I got back to the hotel room for my beer-fueled pity party…

The next morning I got up very early and went back to the airport for my flight, this time to Philly.  I was in seat 4A and boarding with Zone 1, which I assumed was First Class, especially since the agent had said it was.  As I mentioned before, she lied.  4A is actually the front seat in coach, right behind the bulkhead, in other words, one of the worst seats on the plane.  I mentioned the issue to the flight attendant who said I needed to get off the plane and talk to the gate agent.

When I saw that the gate agent was the same lady who had left early the night before, I knew I was in trouble.  I explained my issue and she told me, “No, you’re only First Class out of Philly, and this flight is full.” and she thrust my boarding pass back at me.  Not exactly friendly or helpful, much as I had feared.  So I sat in coach for the, thankfully, uneventful flight.

Now, while First Class is nice, I wasn’t that concerned about it, really.  But what just pisses me off like nothing else is being lied to.  I absolutely HATE it.  It makes me want to punch people in the face.  (Of course, I don’t.)

On the second flight, I was sitting in First and when the flight attendant asked if I wanted anything to drink before we took off, I most certainly did!  I asked for a bloody mary and she told me that she didn’t have the liquor on board yet and it might be a few minutes.  That was fine, and I could certainly wait.  And I would have been OK with it, except that just before we took off I saw her collecting cups from other bottles, including a bloody mary from the passenger right in front of me.  Apparently, there was liquor on board, just not enough for me.

Remember my comment about being lied to?  Yeah.

Eventually, after take off I got my drink.  And then another.  And then another.  I was finally feeling better about things generally, as you might expect.

When I stepped off the plane in Tampa, I felt the heat and humidity on the jetway and it was good to be finally home.

Owen had a football game yesterday morning.  It didn’t go well.  The boys are now 1-4 and they really don’t need to be.  If they’d play in the games the way we practice, they’d be a lot more successful.  We made a ton of dumb mistakes in the game and I probably yelled at them more than I should have.  At some point, the players are just going to have to decide for themselves if they want to play hard (and smart) or not.  There is only so much the coaches can do.  Still, it’s frustrating.

 

Last night we went to the skating rink again.  At Owen’s party there last week, one of his friends won a skating party and they invited us to go.  So we went and had fun.  I strapped on some skates again and enjoyed it, although my back wasn’t too thrilled about the whole thing.  Ironically, Owen won yet another free skating party for next Saturday night, so I guess we’ll be there yet again.

 

This morning I took the kids flying.  I wanted to practice some landings and I had had plans to go up to Brooksville or somewhere else nearby and fly some touch-and-goes and then come back to my home airport and do some more, but the weather was not cooperating.  There was a front coming through and it was cloudy enough that I decided just to stay at the home airport instead.  I did, but then there was a lot of haze on the ground that was getting thicker.  I didn’t want to get caught with fog covering the airport, so we called it a day much earlier than I had planned.

 

We all spent some time doing yard work this afternoon.  It was hot and the love bugs were out in full force, but the yard looks much better.

 

I spent the rest of the afternoon putting up a ceiling fan. I bought two of them the other day to replace two upstairs that weren’t working.  The one in our our loft hasn’t worked for some time, although the light fixture does, and recently the one in our office started smelling like it was burning.  NOT GOOD!  So, I disconnected it and picked up a couple of new ones.

I’m really disappointed in Home Depot over the quality of their fans.  We’ve been buying their Hampton Bay store brand for years and the quality and value just keeps getting worse and worse.  First, they switched to cheaper motors, which are louder and don’t last as long.  Then they started removing features, but of course keeping the price the same.  They got rid of the reverse button on the remotes (replacing it with a switch on the side of the fan which you have to climb up on a chair to reach) and now they’ve gotten rid of the remotes altogether.  If you want a remote control for the fan, it’s now a $30 extra that you have to buy and the receiver is a royal pain to wire up and place in the housing bracket.  Oh, and the light dimmer feature is gone, too.

I wouldn’t keep buying them, but since we already have them, I can re-use the mounting bracket, saving some time to install it, and we can re-use the old remote controls, too (although not the dimmer or reverse buttons).  So I bought the two new ones, with the remote controls and had planned on putting both up this afternoon.

Sadly, I only got one of them put up.  After spending quite a long time putting it all together (they no longer box it with the light fixture attached and, as I mentioned, I had to cram the remote receiver into the housing bracket), the darn thing wouldn’t work.  I could get the light to come on, but not the fan.

I spent a LONG time trying to diagnose the problem, which involved climbing up the ladder, making a change to the wiring, then climbing down, walking down the stairs, into the garage and flipping the circuit breaker on, then hiking back upstairs to check it.  And then back downstairs and out to the garage again to turn the breaker off again and back up to mess it with it some more.

I eventually determined that the remote control receiver was bad.  I replaced it with the one I bought for the loft and the fan finally worked.  I must have gone up and down the stairs 20 times while I was working on it.  And now my back and my knees, already unhappy from the skating, are killing me!

But let this be a lesson for you all.  AVOID the Home Depot Hampton Bay fans!  They’re awful and not worth the money, or the time and effort.

I’ve been updating Facebook regularly, but not this blog.  I’ll try to get better about that.

I just got back from a business trip to Buffalo late Friday night.  I was there all week for meetings at the start of a huge new project I’m working on.  Actually, this project is so big that I’ll be working on it full time for the next year or so and someone else will take over my current duties, so it feels less like a new project and more like a new job.  It’s also got very high (and wide) visibility, so it could be a career-maker or –breaker.

The trip itself was fine.  I didn’t get much time to do anything other than work long hours.  I had been to Niagara Falls before and I didn’t have a car this time (I took the train to work) so I didn’t even try to go there.  We did go out one evening to the Anchor Bar, which is the place that invented Buffalo wings.  And yes, they were pretty good, but nothing special really.

The building I worked in up there is the tallest building in the city and it’s complicated!  Several times for meetings, I’d have to go down from the 21st floor on which I was working, across the lobby, through some security doors, and then up some other elevators or stairs.  Or up a few floors from 21, then cross do a different elevator lobby and continue going up on different elevators.  These days most of my meetings are on the phone and on the rare occasion when I have an “in person” meeting in the office, the conference rooms are about 20 feet from my desk.  The photo is the view from the office window.  The water on the left is Lake Erie and across the water is Ontario, Canada.

On Friday I logged into Delta’s website to try to change seats on my second flight on which I’d been given a middle seat.  I was supposed to land in Detroit at 6:30 and then leave at 7:30 to Tampa.  Unfortunately, the first flight had been “delayed” and would now arrive at 11:30 the following morning, so I was advised to look for alternate flights and no additional cost.  I managed to find a flight, going through Atlanta, which is more direct and would get me into Tampa around midnight, instead of 10:30 as the first flights would have, plus I got an aisle seat for the whole trip this time, so it worked out.

I ended up pulling into our driveway at 1:00 a.m.  It was raining, but still warmer than my entire week up in Buffalo.

I had to get up early on Saturday morning for Owen’s football game, but it was still raining and the game got postponed.  We’re going to try to make it up this week some time.  I did make it to my Civil Air Patrol meeting later in the morning.

Since then, I’ve spent most of the weekend not doing very much.  Tomorrow I’m working from home because we’ve got an insurance adjuster coming over to look at our roof which is leaking in a couple of places.  It appears to be some missing shingles due to wind damage, although I’m not sure when it occurred.  Oh, and our upstairs air conditioner isn’t working today either, just to add to the fun.  Not sure what the problem is with it.  It appears to be running, but is blowing warm air.

Currently my favorite song.

Football and cheer practice got cancelled tonight due to a thunderstorm.  We first pulled the kids off the field and under shelter while we waited to see if it would blow over quickly (it didn’t).  The parents (including me) mostly stood under trees or umbrellas (real smart).  One of the team moms had a lightning detector that is supposed to tell you how close the lightning is getting.  When it was obvious the storm was right overhead I asked her what the detector was saying.  She told me that it just said “Local”.  I noted that, if the lightning gets any closer, it ought to just say, “Duck!”.

I ran a couple of errands at lunch time today, including a stop at Wal-Mart.  Now I don’t mind shopping there generally, with one exception: the check-out line.  They never have enough registers open and the lines are always ridiculously long.  Today I had exactly 10 items in my cart (I counted), so I got into the 10-items-or-less express line.  There were only a couple of families in front of me in line, yet it was still moving very slowly.  I shortly noticed why it was so slow.  The people two in front of me had at least 20 items that I could count and the family right in front of me had over 50 items, a shopping cart full.  The clerk pointed out to them that they were in the express lane, but they pretended they hadn’t seen the big-ass sign right in front of them proclaiming it as such.  Can people not read?!?

I finally got out of there, but ended up getting home late and I missed the alarm guy who was here to figure out why the fire alarm went off the other day.  I had to reschedule him for next week.

(Dirty little secret: Turns out I had 11 items.  I had mis-counted…)

Last weekend was pretty fun.  I spent Saturday morning at a Civil Air Patrol meeting and then part of the afternoon having lunch with an old friend I hadn’t seen in ages.  Beth’s mom came over and after swimming in the pool we went and ran some errands and out to dinner.  On Sunday, we drove over to Beth’s uncle’s place in Indian Rocks Beach.  Beth’s cousin and her family were visiting so we hung out all day at the beach and had a pretty good time.  We took a few photos and here are a couple of the kids playing in the sand and feeding some bread to seagulls:

 

Every night last week and every night this week we’ve had football practice.  The team is starting out fairly well and I’m looking forward to our first game in a few weeks.  They’re just this week getting their pads (last week was all conditioning drills) so they’re starting to hit and tackle and have a lot more fun.  It’s a lot more fun for the coaches, too.  Hopefully, by the end of the week we can scrimmage a bit.

 

My desktop computer seems to have died, at least partially.  I think the problem is the video card I put in it.  I can get it to boot up partially using the video chip on the motherboard, but it never gets past the Windows 7 welcome screen.  At least the hard drives appear to be intact.  I’d have to have to recover all of my data, although I do have a fairly decent back-up system in place.  But not having the desktop running is a royal pain.  It’s the machine I use to pull in all of my RSS feeds from blogs, Twitter, and everywhere, and I sync the rest of my computers from it, so while it’s down, I’m not getting my daily feeds.

 

When I pulled the above photos off of Beth’s camera, I also grabbed some other good ones.  These first two were taken at our community pool one evening as we took the kids for a swim around sunset:

 

And this last one was from the day Beth and I flew down to Venice for lunch at Sharky’s on the beach.  This is a photo of Sharky’s from the Venice Beach Pier:

Our poor dumb dog Jasper.  He’s always been a bit… twitchy and nervous.  He’s afraid of hardwood floors, which we have in most of our house.  He also hates stairs, which we have.  But now he’s also old.  He’s got pretty severe arthritis in his hips so he doesn’t get around so well.  And diabetes.  But we’re treating the arthritis with pills (hidden in peanut butter, which he loves) and the diabetes with insulin.

But he’s also now showing signs of being hard of hearing.  Really hard.  Like practically deaf.  And he seems a bit senile; often confused about where he is or what he’s doing.  Of course, for a dog, that’s not a far leap from “normal”, but still.  On the bright side, being a dumb dog, he doesn’t really think about any of this, so he’s still pretty happy.

I’m still getting used to wearing glasses.  Mostly, I’m having to adjust to wearing them indoors.  I’m used to wearing sunglasses which, of course, I take off when I come inside.  And I still do that, only to then remember that these glasses will turn back from sunglasses to regular ones in a few moments (Transition lenses) and I need to keep them on.  I’ll get it eventually.

 

I spent some time in the pool this afternoon around lunch time.  The water was cold, but the sun was hot, so it was a good balance, very refreshing.  I actually had a work phone conference at noon, but we have a waterproof phone, so I just took the call from the pool.  It’s good to work from home!

I was told that this is “nerd city”, but OK since flying is cool.  It’s a Google Map of all of the airports at which I’ve personally landed.  You might need to zoom out to see them all.

 

View Airports at which I've landed in a larger map

My new glasses finally arrived yesterday.  I can see so much more clearly now, although they are requiring some getting used to.  Sometimes there’s a glare or a reflection and of course, just having them on my face is a bit odd.  Still, it’s worth it to be able to see.  Also, the Transitions lenses don’t get quite as dark as real sunglasses, so I still find myself squinting outside a bit.  I hear that they’ll get darker over time, so that’s good.

 

Our pool is finally all fixed and ready for swimming again.  It took awhile for the repair people to get everything done that it needed: new pump, new filter canister, replacement bulbs for the light in the pool and the spa, drain covers replaced, a leak in the spa fixed.  It was kind of a mess.  But it’s good now!  We still need to get the screens replaced that the dog tore out and we’ll probably put up a 24” kick plate along the bottom of the screen and “pet screen”

 

Not much else going on.  The kids are going horseback riding tomorrow as part of their summer camp.  I’m jealous!  I’ll just be working, as usual, although I’m going to work from home most of the week, I think.  Now that our pool is ready, I can swim during the day.  We have a floating, waterproof phone, so I could even take a meeting from the pool.  That would be pretty cool, I think.

This video is pretty awesome.

Busy day today.  After we got up I checked the weather and then filed a flight plan and then we headed to the airport.  Beth and I were flying down to Venice to eat lunch at Sharky’s, which is about a mile from the airport on the pier at the beach.  It’s a popular pilot destination around here.

The flight down was mostly uneventful.  Beth was nervous, but handled it well.  There were a fair amount of clouds, so we couldn’t climb up above about 1,600 feet.  It was a bit bumpy at that low altitude, but not too bad.  We also had to dodge a couple of rain showers and ended up flying the through the edge of one, getting a bit of a mist, or as I called it, a “free plane wash”.

Once we landed, we got directions to Sharky’s and walked over.  It wasn’t a terribly long walk, but it was HOT and we were both sweaty when we got there.  Fortunately, they’re used to people walking in off the beach and looking like we did.  The food was pretty good; Beth had a chicken sandwich and I had a grouper sandwich.  I love grouper.  Then we walked out on the pier and then down on the beach.  We were looking for shark teeth, which were supposedly plentiful there, but we didn’t find any.

At the restaurant we were seated next to two other couples, each of whom and flown in from other parts of the state, doing the same thing we were.  We decided to take a cab back to the airport and ended up getting there right behind the other two couples.  We chatted with them a bit, the pilots all checked the weather, and then we were off.

The flight back was bumpier than the flight down, but there was no rain.  It’s about a half hour flight and we landed with no issues.

After we got home, we decided to go to the pool, despite some ominous dark clouds nearby.  It turned out to be really nice for half an hour or so and then the thunder and lightning started.  They made everyone get out of the pool (a good idea) and we hung around a bit to see if the storm would pass, but it didn’t, so we left.

Beth had to run to Sam’s Club to buy some food for a meeting she’s holding at the house later this week and I had to do go Busch Gardens.

Yeah, I had to go.  Here’s the deal: The kids are going there later this week with their summer camp and they need annual passes to get in with the camp group (they’re going twice, so it makes sense to buy the annual passes as they are cheaper than two one-day passes would be).  I called Busch Gardens hoping I could do it over the phone, but all they would sell me on the phone was an “E-ticket” which the kids would have to redeem at a kiosk for the real thing, and they’d have to have my debit card to do it.  Yeah, not gonna happen.  I asked if I went to the park, which really isn’t too far from the house, if I could park near the park entrance, rather in the main lot.  The main lot is across the street and you have to then take a shuttle train over to the park, which can take awhile.  Worse, you have to pay to park (and it ain’t cheap), which makes no sense if I’m only going to be there for 10 minutes or so.  The guy on the phone insisted I would have to park.

Like hell I would.

I arrived at the park and pulled in to the “drop off/ pick up” area right near the entrance.  There were people stopped there and signs warning everyone not to leave their vehicle unattended.  I waited a few minutes, but didn’t see any cops or even any park employees enforcing the rules, so I locked up the car and walked over to the ticket booth and bought the tickets.  A few minutes later, I was gone with no ticket or any issues; the perfect crime.

I am such a rebel.

And now we’re leaving in about five minutes to go see “The Hangover”.  I’ve heard good things about it and am looking forward to seeing it.

Science gone silly.

This video is pretty awesome. Taken from a train "black box" as the train gets hit and derailed by a twister.