Christmas Shopping & Other Holiday Stuff

Last Minute Bargains Anyone?


Usually by this time on the calendar in recent years I've already gotten my Christmas Cards mailed and most if not all of my Christmas gifts on the way to their recipients.

Not so this year...for a variety of reasons including myopia and dyslexia and laziness and sloveness and by and large CASH FLOW because we've spent a TON of money getting relocated out here to the Okla-By-God-Dang-Homa and even when I had the CASH I didn't have the time and we refuse to put Christmas presents on a Credit Card.

But the bottom line this morning is that we personally already have our Christmas presents for our household because we absolutely LOVE the Broken Arrow/Eastern Tulsa geographic area and I LOVE my new job and Pat and Missy the Turbo Pup and I LOVE our new house and new neighborhood.

Regarding everyone else...

...we're going shopping on line now in the next couple of days and in some of the local "brick and mortar stores" this weekend and hopefully by Monday morning everything will be on the way to our friends and family.

Honestly we've had some interesting Christmas holidays together over the past ten years living in Atlanta and Florida and on an Island on the Georgia Coast and visiting the Farm in Alabama.

But...

This one is partially by design and partially by circumstance going to be spent "stranded" alone in the middle of the mid-west.

My new company has a nice Christmas party this weekend in a fancy hotel with an open bar and dinner and we've got a room there in the building for Saturday night after the celebration.

And I've got some other ideas for entertaining Pat and the Turbo Pup for Christmas Eve and Christmas day.

So while the family and friends we're missing are residing dozens of hours away by car we're going to get along just fine out here in Oklahoma.

Hope everyone has been a Good Girl or Boy and your Christmas stocking has something other than a lump of coal in it.

Later Y'all...

Writing Malaise

Unfinished Works...


Sorry for the light posting over the past half week.

It isn't for lack of writing because I've probably pounded out five  or six pages on two or three subjects...

...but before I got to the point of hitting the "Publish" button on Blogger I ran out of steam on the topic or else just thought that my work wasn't up to my usual standards and didn't have the time to go back though and fix it.

I'm really in a strange mental state these days being sort of overloaded with the new job and finishing up some personal details relating to moving cross country.

And now it's time to get back to studying my software manuals to support a new project I've just started working on.

Regards Y'all (I'll try to work up a good head of steam and issue a good rant when something comes up in the news...)

Five Day Fire

Livin' The Old Fashoned Way...


Back 100 Years Ago Back in the 1960's at my Grandfather's house in Southern Alabama the fireplace and associated hearths were the center of social interaction sometimes summer and winter. 

You see, by the time I came along my Pa Rushing's home had electricity after WWII, but the water and sewer and what we today call heating and "air conditioning" was an optional feature supplied by the homeowner...in our case that being our family.

Water?

At first we had a hand dug well and a windmill to pump the water we didn't lift by bucket.

Sometime in the 1960's we had a deeper well drilled and an fancy modern electric pump and rubber bladder tank installed to provide showers for all of us grandkids and extra water for cooking and the dogs and chickens and cows.

I Can't Get There From Here?

Modern Airline Insanity...


So one of my regular readers...my Buddy Ed... commented and reminded me that I should be in Knoxtown this weekend taking care of our rental house.

That would be a true statement Ed because I made plans a month ago to be there this weekend.

But my chosen airline...freaking UNITED AIRLINES...decided to delay the departure of my 6:20 PM flight last Friday night to a time so late that I was going to end up missing my connecting flight from Chicago on to Knoxville.

But then being the savvy traveler which I am, and understanding from looking at the UNITED AIRLINES WEBSITE and learning that my original Chicago-Knoxville flight was the last one on their airline on Friday night, I managed to force them to admit that they were willing to let me LEAVE TULSA and then STRAND ME in Chicago about 10 PM and make me argue with them about paying for a hotel.

So fortunately after speaking with some lovely woman in a "customer service" center in India or Malaysia or possibly Belize, and living on hold for most of 30 minutes while I argued about canceling the outbound leg of the flight and keeping the inbound leg Monday evening...

United/Continental Airlines, in their infinite wisdom said...

They couldn't do it...

They simply wanted me to leave Tulsa at 6:20 PM and miss my flight to Knoxville, then  spending the night in or near O'Hare airport (and possibly at my expense if I needed a room), and then not leaving Chicago until 2:40 PM Saturday afternoon  finally arriving in Knoxville about 6 PM. 

A two day trip.

Now understand this fact ladies and gentlemen...

I can drive to Knoxville in 14 hours for less than $250 in gas, and these idiots want me to do the same trip in 12 hours for the price of an airplane ticket and a motel room?

The original idea was to be in Knoxville before midnight Friday and have all day Saturday and Sunday and most of the day on Monday to get some stuff done that I need to do.

You Know?

This wasn't intended to be a pleasure trip to Knoxville to buy University of Tennessee T-shirts or eat ribs at Calhouns' restaurant.

After the dust settled I checked the airline web sites and Kayak.com and according to the websites my only alternative was to spend a couple of hundred dollars more than I originally paid United Freaking Airlines over A MONTH AGO in order to pull this thing off after recycling the schedule from Friday PM to Saturday AM.

So doing the math and looking at the other things going on around here, and considering that the idiot Real Estate company in Knoxtown which I have contracted with to lease our house refused to respond on a timely manner,

I was finally forced to make an executive decision and do something very complicated (OK...not).

I stayed home with Pat and little Missy the Turbo Pup and worked on my Garage and Office.

I'm happy and my girls are tickled pink as my delayed anger grows directed toward my so-call "leasing agent" in Knoxtown.

Looking forward past the holiday season where airline ticket prices are impossibly high, it looks like prices to fly come daown a good deal and there is a good possibility that there will be some thunder and lightening in Knoxville on the rental real estate management busienss front the week of January 9th, 2012.

Stay tuned to this channel for more details...

I Can't Get There From Here?

Dueling Dealing With Living With "Small Market" Airports...


This morning one of my regular readers commented with a question about my whereabouts this weekend. I had already planned on commenting on my personal pre-holiday travel situation...once I calmed down a little from the trama...by doing a blog posting...so here it is.

Yes Ed, I was supposed to be flying back in Knoxville this weekend to take care of some business relating to the house we own there, but the Airlines, in their infinite wisdom (or lack thereof), changed my plans an hour and one half before I was supposed to depart our "Tulsa International Airport" yesterday evening.

But since you know me, I can't answer a question directly, and thus I take this opportunity to digress and talk about my history of flying while ending up telling the story of why I ended up spending this weekend cleaning out my garage and organizing my office in Tulsa, Oklahoma (airport code TUL) rather than beating the crap out of a guy that calls himself a "Realtor" and hiring a new contractor to do some work at our empty, unrented house in Knoxtown, Tennessee (airport code TYS)

Here goes...

First you have to understand that I spent the first 17 years of my life with my only contact with aircraft being looking at them in magazines, watching them on TV, and building them in the form of plastic and balsa wood models and flying them around our front yard and on over at the local elementary school ballfield. 

Don't get me wrong. 

I was absolutely CRAZY about everything having to do with airplanes, but I just didn't do much flying since my family elected to drive on vacation like most other families did in the 1960's and 1970's.

Wait..my dad--the Army Test Pilot--drove me out to our local airfield and took me up in a Cessna 172 with another pilot for an hour flight around our little town of Ozark, Alabama including flying over our house and "wagging our wings" to our neighbors.

But then things changed drastically at the age of 18 when I joined the Navy Reserve through the NROTC program at Georgia Tech and the summer after my Freshman year President Jimmy Carter sent me off on my first "Summer Cruise."

It was a "Cruise" all right, but not a "Carnival Cruise Line Cocktail In Both Hands" type of cruise, and the process of getting to the boat Ship was in and of itself an adventure I'll never get over or forget.

To put this adventure in context, you have to understand that other than the aforementioned birthday flight in 1968 I had never been in an airplane actually flying in the air for more than a single hour.

Now fast forward our story to August 1978 and I find myself standing at the Delta Airlines ticket counter with my Mother and Father presenting a government issued voucher to the ticket agent allowing me to board a flight from Dothan, Alabama and heading to the old (and now torn down) Hartsfield Terminal Building in Atlanta, Georgia.

Wait...come to think of it that wasn't actually my first visit to Hartsfield Airport...because my Dad took us over to the Terminal Building on one of our driving trips up to West Virginia to visit his parents back in the late 1960's and we went up on the "observation deck" to watch the Douglas DC-3's and Lockheed Tristars take off and land.

Better entertainment than going to a Circus or the County Fair to me.

So any way, with much pomp and circumstance and a few tears from my Mother, I boarded my first commercial airline flight heading ultimately to of all places...

SUBIC BAY, PHILLIPINES.

Now don't get me wrong here ladies and gentlemen, I was a quite well traveled youth having been driven to New Jersey and ridden a train from there into New York City when I was in Kindergarten.

I'd ridden in a car with my family not once but TWICE from Alabama to Pasadina, California before I was High school aged.

We took another trip to Salt Lake City, Utah and numerous other eastern regional trips to places like Washington DC  and Manassas, Virginia in our Motorhome.

"I'd been around"...

I thought.

But...

This "flying half way around the planet" stuff was something quite different.

Picture Jim Nabors character Gomer Pyle.

"Shazam" was an understatement when considering my situation, in my considered Redneck opinion.

Speeding this story up, Delta loaded up my luggage and my silly 18 year old butt on a DC-9 in Dothan, hauled me to Atlanta, managed to not allow me to get lost in the process and put me on a giant Lockheed L-1011 and  dumped me back on the ground in San Francisco, California...

all in less than about eight hours as I recall.

Then the non-stop adventure continued.

After stumbling around the airport there in San Fran I managed to find some guy in a Government Issued uniform who proceeded to direct me to an "area" where a bunch of other bewildered "Midshipmen"--also mostly on their first flights--were sequestered awaiting the next segment of our journey to begin.

I guess the first thing I learned while being on active duty in the Navy was the art of "hurry up and waiting."

There in that room with those rows of attractive upolstered yet impossibly hard seats we waited until the very last person on the very last plane ever arriving that day in California came into the room. Or at least that is what it seemed like.

Next they hearded us into some olive drab Military issue busses,  and proceeded to drive us across the mountains to a place called Travis Air Force Base.

Then, after some more waiting...serveral hours worth--something they call "Mustering" in the Military-- we finally got to see and get on the giant airplane which would haul us on the next leg of our journey...Alaska.

This time Lockheed was also the manufacturer, but the airframe was a lumbering C-141 "Starlifter"...

outfitted not with passenger accommodations but with "jump seats."

In having "jump seats" what it really means was the plane was set up for short duration missions "in theater" where the troups would have combat gear and parachutes and not required to make the SIX HOUR flight we faced.

Instead of rows and rows of seats facing forward like you would find in a bus or commercial airliner, this monster sized plane had a row of seats made out of nylon webbing running down the sides of each wall and then two similarly constructed rows of seats running down the middle facing  back to back.

The short duration design apparently didn't matter to the Air Force because they were just hauling Navy Midshipmen...

But hey, they did have the handy "kitchen module" so they could serve a hot metal pan of food in flight and there was the "pooper module" up in front of that contained things and conditions even I refuse to describe here on this blog relating to bathroom sanitation.

So they literally threw our duffle bags and extra suitcases into the back of the plane, strapped everything down with cargo nets, hearded us all on board and off we flew into "the wild blue yonder."

All tongue in cheek humor and sarcastic commentary aside, being young and strong and healthy at that time  I found that leg of that 27 hour trip to be the best part of the sojurn.

They gave each of us the chance to come up into the cockpit and spend ten or fifteen minutes sitting in a little seat between the three man flight crew just looking out at the horizon and around the instrument panels.

Since we were flying to the north west we were basically chasing the sunset, and it was a clear day with various layers of thin clouds hanging here and there and during my visit to the cockpit I remember seeing the sun just hanging on the horizon casting an orange and yellow glow on everything as we flew over the mountains of Washington state.

Hours later, Alaska is and was a blur in my memory because it was night when we got there and it was still night when we left after refueling the Jet and laying around on the floor in the under capacity "departure lounge" waiting on whatever it is that the military "logistics" people have to have happen before you do whatever it is that you could probably have done a couple of hours earlier if it wasn't for waiting on the "Paperwork."

We blasted off on that plane finally, now heading on the next leg of our adventure...

Yokota Air Base...

JAPAN.