Engulfed by Climate Change, Town Seeks Lifeline - New York Times

Engulfed by Climate Change, Town Seeks Lifeline - New York Times

Is this perhaps a sign of things to come for New Orleans?

I think maybe it is, and for many coastal cities...

Day Trip to L.A.


The Bob Hope Airport. "Serving the public since 1930".

I do this once a month; go to L.A. for a meeting. It's a fairly enjoyable meeting with lots of new products to taste. I look forward to it.

The flight out of Vegas to Burbank is early and usually pretty empty and most of the time, it's in a very new and clean plane. Two months ago, the plane was brand new! Like a week old! I love that "new plane" smell, don't you? What? You've never experienced it? Well, that's not such a surprise since there are so many old planes in the air and the new ones tend to end up on the more glamorous routes. But Southwest had to put some of the newer aircraft on the Vegas/Burbank trip because landing and taking off from that tiny airport is a bit much. Landing there, you dropout of the sky, bounce and screech to a halt. They roll stairways up to both the front and the back of the plane!

Taking off on the short runways can be more of a problem. The flights to Vegas on a Thursday are usually full; and full of "happy" people on their way to a giddy weekend in Vegas. One recent flight home was delayed over two hours. There were to reasons why: one; the winds were rather unfavorable for a successful take off and two; there was no way we were going to make it with a full plane in those cross winds. So there were the usual negotiations for later flights and compensation, although nothing to make me want to get off of the plane. I took a nap. I got back to Vegas about two hours late, after a stop in Ontario, CA for more fuel! That was reassuring!

Today, the plane out was 25 minutes late, but that's not bad for around five P.M. The plane was boarded fairly quickly, except for a few idiots. The flight to Vegas, in good winds can take as little as 45 minutes; today we made it in 44.




>>

I have a new camera, a Canon Power Shot S3 IS. It is the most complicated camera that I have ever owned. Fortunately there is a new model coming out soon, so this one dropped a lot in price; it was less than my last digital camera. I was thinking about getting a digital SLR camera, but it would have been about three times the price of this one, and this one had all the features that I would have to deal with on a DSLR camera. I have a sort of vague understanding of F-stop, and ISO and shutter speed and all that, and I decided that having a camera that allowed those things would help me to figure out how to use those settings. This camera also has an "AUTO" mode that works quite brilliantly, which is fortunate, since I needed to do some pics for work right away! I have begun to play around with the settings, with decidely mixed results so far, but I am learning. The pics for work were hugely better than the ones I had been taking with my SD400 pocket size Canon, but this new camera is also quite a bit bigger; a worth while trade off so far.



CYNDI LAUPER!!!!
http://www.truecolorstour.com/

The True Colors Tour!

And we, (luca, Alex, his cousin and I) will be there at the MGM Garden Arena on June 8, 2007!

It is going to be so fabulous! In addition to Cyndi, there will be Debbie Harry!, Erasure!!!, The Dresden Dolls, (don't know them, but they look interesting) and for the Vegas concert only, the Indigo Girls. Margaret Cho is the Emcee!!! I can't wait!


And then, only a few weeks later I am off to Boston and then to the Cape for a week with the family. My brother has rented an astounding place on the beach, a huge house with all of the ammenities! I mean, HD TV in the living room and a huge deck right on the beach, four bedrooms, a "gourmet" kitchen. It's very high end for us, but the trip for my bro and his family and especially my Dad, is only about ninety minutes by car and that's important; not having to fly them somewhere leaves a lot extra in the budget.

It's not in Province Town... but it's in a lovely part of the Cape with huge sand dunes and Martha's Vineyard across the bay. We wlll make a trip up to P-Town for a day and also do Martha's Vineyard, because I have to visit the oldest continuously operating carrousel in the states. Yes, yes... I have to do that.

It's so wonderful to be able to spend a week with my family in a beach house, well, in fact, in any house where we can all be together! We will also have the nursing service for a couple of hours a day for my Dad, which makes it all easier.I'm looking forward to taking lots of pictures with the new camera and also to nap time with the kids; it's a wonderful sort of quiet time that doesn't happen anywhere else in my life. I sleep so well when my family is around me.


It seems that the formatting of the text here is kind of off, everything gets run together usually. Maybe this time it will be different. I am going to try one of the online services, maybe "ThinkFree", they have a posting engine for Blogger that might work better.


durlx
durlx
durlx

The Joy of Drinking - Barbara Holland - Books - Review - New York Times

This is a delightful perspective on a subject has been ill used for the last decade or so.

The Joy of Drinking - Barbara Holland - Books - Review - New York Times

Rethinking Thin - Gina Kolata - Books - Review - New York Times

Interesting and thoughtful. Sometimes you get hwat you get and you don't throw a fit, eh?


Rethinking Thin - Gina Kolata - Books - Review - New York Times