Okay, Enough Nagging

My Uncertain friend wants an update. I am capable of updating this blog outside of airports. To prove it, I am presently ensconced in my own office chair in my own converted dining room home office and typing on my vintage 1984 IBM Model M "Clicky" keyboard. I bought it on E-Bay a couple of weeks ago because my hands were killing me from typing on my laptop keyboard. I briefly considered taking it with me on my last trip, but decided against it. Th thing weights about six pounds (three kilos). This is as close to a perfected machine as we have in the IT industry.

And of course, it's obsolete.

I've been in this industry long enough to be a curmudgeon.

Dodgeball

But dear UC wants to know about family and kids, being as how she can no longer read minds. The kids are great. Winding down the school year. Eldest is committed to NAU. I cut yet another business trip short last week to referee a dodgeball tournament at the high school on Firday. Eldest and Middle (aka Son) are in student council and had come up with the tournament as a fundraiser. A fun, but exhausting evening. The team registrations paid all their expenses ($40 per eight-person team and they had 20+ teams) and they committed the door receipts to a charitable cause, the family of a kid in Middle's sophomore class who had turned up with leukemia (of which more shortly). The concession was their fundraiser and netted them over $600 which made it a decent night's work.

Rough Treatment

We've known the kid with leukemia for several years. Son played Little League baseball with him. He was playing in a baseball game and started feeling bad enough that the trainer told his dad to take him to the ER. I would not trade 48 weeks of treatment for one day of what those parents are going through.

As for the kid, well, we all know that hep C treatment is long and grueling. To those on treatment: when when you start feeling sorry for yourself (and you will), consider what this kid is facing.

• He has one of those ports installed in his chest where they can dump chemicals directly into a major artery because the stuff is so toxic it will destroy veins.



• He has lost his hair. Not thin hair, no hair.



• He is on massive doses of steroids giving him a moon face even though he's lost twenty pounts.



• His white blood count was so low last month that he was confined to two rooms of the house. Anyone entering had to leave their shoes at the door and wash up. If he went out, he had to wear a mask



• Oh, and his treatment calendar? Three years.

I know what treatment is like. I won't minimize it. But, it's a piece of cake compared to full-on chemo. Never forget that. If I have to face a potentially life-threatening disease, hepatitis C is my first choice.

I'm putting my foot down and I won't travel for the month of May — and will probably get more done without the overhead of traveling. Our anniversary is coming up next week (21 years! Our marriage is an adult!). Of course we won't be doing much to observe it until maybe June. Youngest is in a musical and Eldest is graduating from high school. Family and friends, and all that.

With that, I'm out of here. I have an 8:00 AM Eastern Daylight Time (that would be 5:00 AM Arizona time).

Friday the 13th

I'm traveling on business again. I've been to the Richmond, Virginia area three times in the past six weeks. And I'll probably be back again. I'm rusty at this road warrior thing. There was a time I did it pretty regularly as an instructor, but for the past ten years or so I've stuck pretty close to home.

Much has changed.

First of all is the process of traveling itself. I'm old enough to remember a time when you walked straight from the ticket counter to your flight. The advent of metal detectors provoked predictions of the death of American civil liberties and the Fourth Amendment. The Fourth Amendment didn't die then, but it started getting sick then.

I don't think the current practice of a partial strip-search would bother me quite as much if it made me feel any safer. It doesn't take too much imagination to cause lots of havoc on an airplane that might not be detected by current methods. Conversations with a friend who took a temporary job screening baggage for TSA have done little to ease that concern.

Nothing to do about it.

Today is Friday the Thirteenth. I've been operating on the assumption that things will go worse than they have so far.

I cleared out of my hotel this morning and had that sinking sensation that I'd forgotten something. I could not find my jacket anywhere. I remembered taking it off in the restaurant the night before. Aw shit moment.

Go back to the restaurant. Nobody there.

Back to the hotel check the room. Not there.

Check the car. Not there.

Dial into a conference call on my cell.

Call the restaurant. They don't see it.

Another conference call.

Sudden realization: It's in my suitcase. I remembered hanging it up.

Get my jacket and go to the customer site using my handy little navigation feature on the phone. Make a wrong turn despite the navigation tool. Realize it just as the navigation thing tells me to turn around.

At the airport. Eat lunch in the Appleby's at the airport. Get my computer out and do a bit of work. Finish lunch and walk out with laptop. Sudden stop and return to get case from under table.

Boarding the airplane at last. But first, I can't tell my seat from my gate on the boarding pass. A nice young lady takes my pass from me and tells me where I should sit with the same caring look that I might give as I hold the door for my grandmother.

At the connection. Where's my boarding pass for my connecting flight? No, that's from my last trip. Get the current one. Check gate information. Good. Throw away boarding pass (that's speculation -- I just can't find it). The gate agent printed a new one. Might have been even more interesting if I hadn't put my drivers license back in my billfold before losing the boarding pass.

I'm still in the air. There's plenty of time for things to go wrong, but I'm not going to borrow trouble. Besides my battery is low. In more than one sense.

April 18 Post-Trip Addendum

I survived. The plane arrived an hour and a half late. We were dodging the weather in the accompanying picture. I've flown on all kinds of planes, big and small. We were above 35,000 feet (10,000 meters) and the clouds out the window were a good 10,000 feet (3,000 meters or more) above us. The pilot confirmed my guess.

Was all this the aftermath of treatment? Or did I just have my head in my ass? It's really hard to say, and it probably doesn't make much difference. I have to go back next week.