From Mom: Pleasant (and Not So Pleasant) Airline Memories

I’ve decided to carry on the good/bad theme that Julie and Rob used recently, except that I want to write about pleasant (not so pleasant) airline memories.

One of my pleasant memories would be the time I was returning from an NTI session and got to Dallas early. I discovered that an earlier flight to Austin had just loaded. When I said, “Gee, I wish I could have caught that flight and gotten home sooner”, the gate agent said, “Well, let’s get you on this one”. So we went down the jetway, he knocked on the already closed door, they opened it and let me on, and there was a seat and even a place to put my carry-on.

Another would be the time our flight from Prague to Amsterdam was late and they made everybody else wait while the 10 or 12 of us on the flight to America were escorted off that plane and unto the plane to the US they’d held for us.

And the time British Airlines decided that if Rob had jeans to replace his “cut-offs”, that they could move the four of us up to business class for the flight from London to Dallas. Of course, Bob may consider that an unpleasant memory since it meant I tried to never, ever again sit in coach.

On another overseas flight I was sitting by an older couple who did not speak English. A young woman kept checking on them, and when I asked if she’d like to change seats with me, she said, “Sure, if you don’t mind”. And when I discovered she was in business class, no, I definitely did not mind. One unpleasant part of that trip was the fact that I’d told the airline beforehand that I was diabetic, but really regretted having done so when they brought my diabetic tray and everyone else was having lobster.

Now on to my terrible, horrible, no-good, very unpleasant flight on Tuesday: I arrived at the gate for my 5:35 flight to Chicago about an hour and 45 minutes early, passing Gate 1, where the 3:50 flight to Chicago was to depart. Soon, I began to hear announcements about lightning in Chicago and delays into and out of Chicago and finally an announcement that there’s a “ground stop” or something similar in Chicago, and nothing was going in or out.

At 5:00, they announced that the 5:15 flight to Las Vegas was now departing from Gate 5. “Isn’t that our gate?” Yeah, it was and here came all the people for that flight lining up around us. And then, although there was no announcement, someone came and said, “our flight is now at Gate 1”. So we all trooped down there only to discover that all the passengers from the 3:50 flight were still waiting for their flight – at that gate, and had all the seats.

The 3:50 flight finally left around 5 pm since things were now moving into and out of Chicago. Which was good, because our flight had to come to us from Chicago, which would take about an hour and 15 minutes. While we were waiting, I checked and was reassured that we would get to Chicago by 7:05 (CST) and that my flight to Austin, originally scheduled for 7:30, was now scheduled for 7:50. So “no problem”, they kept saying.

We did finally leave Pittsburgh, later than they’d said, but did get into Chicago at 7:25. The Austin gate was the next gate over and was still showing a 7:30 departure. I rushed over and got in the A group line, although they weren’t loading anyone else.

At 8 pm, there was an announcement that our plane was ready for the Austin flight, but that our pilot was on a flight from Denver, which should arrive at 8:45. A little before 9, they started loading and when we all got on, they told us that our pilot’s plane from Denver had landed and as soon as he could get to our concourse, we’d be ready. He came rushing in, got a large cheer, and we finally left Chicago between 9:20 and 9:30.

It was bumpy all the way home and the seat belt sign stayed on the whole way. The flight attendants did serve snacks and drinks and people would get up and go to the bathroom. About 35 minutes before Austin, the pilot asked the flight attendants to pick up trash, asked us to put tray tables up, stow carry-ons, yada, yada. He asked flight attendants to take their seats and said we were going to go a little east to approach Austin. (The storm he went around dumped 19 inches on Marble Falls in a couple of hours that night.)

Our arrival had been scheduled for 10, but we landed at 11:40, my checked bag was among the last 3 or 4 to get out, and we finally got home and to bed around 1 am. (I had gotten up about 6:30 Texas time that morning, so it was a very, very long day.)

Welcome Home

Mom got home from West Virginia last night. Well, technically she got home in the wee hours this morning. Bad weather in Chicago really put Southwest Airlines into a crunch and for a while there it looked like she might be playing the Orbitz “Who can find a hotel room?” game.

I think I’m as glad as she is that she didn’t have to stay over. I really don’t function well when she’s gone. It has been a running joke regarding my retirement that we carefully mapped out the days I can be home and the days I can’t so that we don’t get on each other’s nerves. Well, perhaps she feels stronger about that than I do, but I was ready for some minor conflict after about the third day. I have a mental image of myself as being cast in the mold of one of Garrison Keeler’s Norwegian Bachelors – self-sufficient, resolute and capable. The truth of the matter is I’m more like Percy Kilbride’s Pa Kettle (I know, that’s BYT).

Granted, there is a certain pleasure in leaving the bed unmade for the duration, and letting dishes pile up until the last possible minute (I didn’t eat at home this much; how can I have this many dirty dishes?) but it doesn’t make up for meals eaten alone and long, boring evenings. Plus – and I admit this with some shame – it’s inconvenient. I mean, I had to keep going to Wal-Mart to buy clean underwear!

No, the truth is, she stock-piled the clean underwear, and foodstuffs, and all the other things I depend on her for before she left. But you can’t stock-pile conversations and glances and touches; and even the 42” High Def TV can’t provide companionship. I’m glad she’s home. I missed her.

Early Christmas shopping!

I am so going to add this to the shopping list! If you look closely, the box says the deer raises his head and sings!

Caution! Road Work Ahead

When we moved into this house 35 years ago it was not in the City of Austin. We anticipated that to be a temporary condition, and sure enough, we were annexed – year before last. For three decades if you looked at a map of the incorporated city you found our little subdivision completely encircled by the city – but not included. We sort of figured that it would be such a huge chore to provide wastewater services – given the solid rock that underlies most of this subdivision – that the city could not justify the return on investment. I’m still not sure of the economics, but the wastewater project is underway, nevertheless.

They began last year in the adjacent subdivision – those houses down by the creek and over toward I-35. We know some people from church who live down there and they told us horrifying stories every week. Our turn came shortly after the beginning of the year when they began work on “Section B.” That’s us and most of the rest of Four Seasons. Several months ago crews came and drove stakes in our yards and painted marks and numbers on the street and put up little sections of chain-link fence in our yards. For example, here’s our fencelet. I do not know what the fence is for. Other neighbors have them and but many others don’t. We’re just lucky, I guess.

Then we anxiously waited for the dreaded trenching machine, a monstrous contraption that eats a path 6 feet wide and some varying number of feet deep down the middle of the street, shakes pictures off the walls, robs you of your hearing and throws up tsunamis of dust. Of course, while this machine and trench are in front of your house you don’t get to use your driveway. Supposedly, they won’t keep you cut off for more than 48 hours. During that time you park on the street in the next block (assuming you got your car out in time), and if you need something hauled in or out the foreman says they will help with that. I heard him say that myself, so I know it must be true.

Crews follow behind the trenching machine putting a honking big pipe in the trench and then they cover it up as they go along. About the time you think it’s safe to use your driveway, backhoes come and dig up the covered up part of the trench where the stakes are and dig lateral lines into your yard, removing your curb and destroying your sprinkler system. The contactor has a special number to call just to report damaged sprinkler systems. Nothing happens if you do; there evidently is a special secret number for actually getting repairs done and they aren’t giving that number out. Once these guys go away, then you are home free except for the ten or twelve times they come back and dig up some more – maybe because a worker lost a comb or something in the hole. I don’t know what they’re doing.

Now to be fair, this hasn’t happened in front of our house yet. We thought they were coming, but they got bogged down in the block below us (by the vacant lot and big tree) and they spent several weeks digging a serious hole in the road and filling it up then digging it out again. We would drive by and see six or eight foreman-type guys standing at a barrier looking into the hole. I imagine they were saying things like, “Yep. That sure is a hole, alright.” When they finally got tired of looking at that hole they moved over to April and dug another hole. Variety is the spice of life.

So, for now we just watch the dump trucks drive up and down our street, intermixed with the occasional back hoe or grader and listen to the obnoxious “beep beep beep” when something backs up. And every day when we return home, we wonder what adventure awaits us on our street. We’ll keep you posted.

Senior Moment #612

"It's getting so hot I need to get one of those windshield cover thingeys since my car sits out all day at the office."

"You mean like the one that's in the backseat of your car?"

"Oh. Um... well, that takes care of that."

"New Price"

Austin consistently ranks in the top 10 or so “Best Places to Live.” According to a recent Money Magazine poll this is the 2^nd best big city to live, trailing only Colorado Springs, CO. I wouldn’t mind living there either. Often Austin gets ranked in the best places to retire but usually only because the Hill Country is included in the demographic. When Bergstrom Airbase was in operation, Air Force personnel retired here in droves, attracted by everything Austin offered plus access to the subsidized base facilities, such as the PX and hospital.

The housing crunch has been milder here and the real estate market is still brisk, with houses bought and sold at near market value. However, from time-to-time one does see "For Sale" signs with attachments that say “New Price.” That’s ever so much more marketing-friendly than “Reduced" so I’m sure that’s what was on the sign outside a Barton Creek house featured in the Sunday paper. Its New Price was $2.995 million. Its old price was $3.5 million.

I don’t know why it’s still on the market – check out the description: “The house on a double lot on Winding Creek Drive was designed by David Shiflet of the Shiflet Group (yes, the David Shiflet that attended Brentwood years ago; the same David Shiflet that has done Lance’s last two houses) and built by Jim Fortune” (if ever there was an appropriate name for a homebuilder).

“The house features more than a million dollars in landscaping alone, according to the listing agent for the property. The exterior brick is handmade, and the slate roof is from the quarry that Thomas Jefferson used to build the University of Virginia and Monticello. The house has plenty of extras (one would hope): a five-car garage, three game rooms, a large pool, a mahogany office, walls that are 12 inches thick (I think that’s what caught Mom’s attention), five bedrooms, six bathrooms and 2 half-baths” (‘Honey, can you bring me a towel?’ ‘Sure. Where are you?’). And – get this – “$60,000 in hand-painted wallpaper in the dining room.”

After supper, maybe we’ll drive over and check it out. Never know when you might want to upgrade the old homestead. Plus, it has a “New Price.”

Coffee on the patio

As you know, the weather in Austin does not lend itself to patio-sitting much of the year. Early-morning is of course more comfortable, but when summer really comes to town it is just too hot and humid to enjoy being outside – even in the mornings. So now is the time to enjoy the patio. Now is the time to sit in my new $10 plastic chair, put my coffee cup on a left-over kindergarten table and survey my kingdom. Life is good.

Unlike some of you, we’re not surrounded by flowerbeds and foliage. There is a large pot with a few tomato plants (actually bearing tomatoes, I’m pleased to report), two pots of cucumber plants that have bloomed like crazy but have yet to set a cucumber, and two pots of mystery flowers that have pretty blooms, but we haven’t a clue what they are. They were on sale at Home Depot and there probably was a sign somewhere that gave the name, but we kind of missed that. So they are anonymously pretty.

We have the bird feeder of course, but they don’t come feed when you are sitting out. They just sit in the tree and gripe until you go back inside. The back yard stays adequately mowed, thanks to Todd and his crew. They can mow the front and back, trim the edges and blow off the sidewalk in less time than it took me to get the mower gassed up. The Bramblett pecan tree is a nice size now, but we’ve never gotten any pecans from it. That’s about it, view wise.

It’s the borders of the kingdom that give me pause. It’s a jungle out there. Who knew that the 4 little hedge plants I put between us and the Nichol’s property would grow as tall as the house, and that wild grape vines and something that looks suspiciously like poison ivy would take root in those hedges and twine themselves into an impenetrable barrier? Or that over on the other edge of the property the rootstock of a hybrid mail-order pear tree would outlive the tree and now be a thick squatty bush that yields what may be crab apples and takes up too much room.

Or that down at the back fence a bazillion hackberry saplings would grow into a solid wall, blocking completely the view to the neighbor’s yard – not that’s necessarily a bad thing – It’s just that there are so many of them! The Chinese Tallow along the lower left fence is now threatening both electric line and cable – neither of which I am willing to do without. And then there’s the sink hole just beyond the patio where once there was a big hackberry. Ben Baisdon’s crew cut the tree down before it fell on the house and where there was once a stump now there’s a pit. I have visions of it opening up some day and swallowing everything and our house becomes film at eleven. And has anyone seen the coral snake lately? No? Good.

I really need to do something about the wilderness at the edge of my verge. But first, I think I’ll have another cup of coffee.

Thank goodness for teeth!

The family that eats free together…

I recognize that there is entirely too much emphasis on eating in this blog. It’s not like that now we’re retired all we do is sit around and think about food. We sit around, watch TV and think about food. But seriously, folks…

I do think, however, that the latest trend in our dining experiences is worth mentioning – and that’s eating for free! It started two weeks ago when we went to Black Eyed Pea for Sunday lunch. We enjoyed our meal, and as we were finishing up, the manager came by and said “This one’s on me – just take care of the waiter.” I began to protest that everything had gone smoothly and there was no need to do this (unlike another time when things did not go smoothly), but Barbara was kicking me under the table, so I shut up. It seems that she had taught the manager’s child a couple of years ago and he recognized her. Cool!

Then today at Red Lobster, we were seated promptly, but no wait staff came by; not even a “be with you in a minute.” This has happened before, so after about 15 minutes we caught the manager’s eye and indicated we had been waiting a while and he really stepped up. He took our drink order and said he would he would treat us to some appetizers. We said no thanks; we would just order our meal. So then he wanted to know what we were having and when we told him the popcorn shrimp he said it was on him and he would go put our order in and someone would be right with us. I’m thinking at this point I really should have said, “Lobster!” but it was too late. But I’m really liking this trend that’s developing for Sunday lunch.

Now it’s Sunday evening and there’s no Care Group this week since it would only be Mom and I and maybe one other person, so we’re planning a quiet evening at home. There’s a new Pizza Hut take-out place on Braker now, and we thought we would go online and order some wings for supper. Unfortunately, the new place can’t take on-line orders yet, and the web page said they didn’t deliver to our subdivision which is six tenths of a mile from that location, so we gave up and got in the car and went and ordered some wings for take-out. The ordering part went okay, but the taking-out part didn’t work out that well. Not for us or the half-dozen or so folks who were waiting, or coming back in to bring back an incorrect pizza order. It was quite a mess. Finally, the manager came over and handed out coupons for free large pizzas to all of us waiting. Now we did pay for the wings, but scoring a free large pizza is never a bad thing!

So now I’m wondering where we can go next Sunday and expect bad service – or just get lucky.

The family that eats out together...

Evidently there is some concern about Mom and I spending our retirement in the kitchen. Rest assured, we still eat out a lot. And we like, for the most part, to go to familiar places – tried and true, where we seldom have to look at the menu (or the menu is a sign on the wall). However, in our old age we sometimes get a little wild and crazy and go off in search of some place new to eat. There is no end to the choices for lunch or dinner – just drive out I-35 and survey the crop of national chain restaurants that hug the access roads; Bennigans, Golden Wok, Pei Wei, Saltgrass Steakhouse, Cheddar’s, Johnny Carrino’s, Carraba’s Italian Grill, Joe’s Crab Shack, etc. etc.

And, this being a real foodie town, I could name 50 locally-owned restaurants that get multiple stars in the travel guides, never mind the 150 really funky places that make Austin what it is – places like Dirty’s Hamburgers and Hut’s and Frisco Shops, and of course, Chuy’s.

But we were just looking for some place besides McDonalds or IHOP to have breakfast and discovered a really good new place. Well, new to us – Fran’s has been around since 1978, and I had actually eaten there before. If you attended Reagan High you probably did too – it’s just across 290 on Cameron Road. It was brought to mind by an episode of “Friday Night Lights” which is filmed here in Austin; often setting scenes in real Austin places, like Appleby’s and the Broken Spoke – and Fran’s. The one they used was in South Austin, but one Saturday morning I looked up and saw the Fran’s in North Austin and we decided to try it.

The first thing you notice about Fran’s is that they don’t take credit cards or checks. It is a cash-only establishment. You seat yourself (and you go stand at the counter when you get ready to pay). Looking over the clientele, you notice a lot of older people, and it’s obvious from the banter between tables and with the wait staff (all three of them) that these people come here every Saturday. Maybe every day. There’s a smattering of good-old-boys; last week two next to us were talking about buying and selling at the local gun show. The dry-wall installers and the carpet layers eat here too as well as an elderly fellow in a suit and tie who just has to be the Pastor at the Ebenezer Baptist church down the road. Well, a Deacon at least. The crowd is pretty evenly divided among the big three racial groups – meaning Mom and I are in the minority.

The breakfast is what you would expect; eggs any way you want them and in any number. Pancakes, breakfast tacos, grits, biscuits, hash browns. You can of course get those with ham, bacon or sausage. And on weekends you can get my favorite, steak and eggs with 2 sides for $7.95. As the hand-lettered white-board sign said last week, “Try are week-end special!” Even after someone pointed out the grammatical error, the waitress still wasn’t sure what was wrong with the sign. Except for the ethnic mix, it might still be 1978 inside Fran’s.

And recently we tried Ken’s, the breakfast taco place on Cameron Road just before you get to Rundberg (you know, on the way to Wal-Mart). For years we have encountered the traffic jam of cars stalled out on Cameron trying to get into Ken’s tiny, tiny parking lot. The other morning, coming back from Wal-Mart, I saw that the sign said “Breakfast Taco’s All Day.” So I stopped and got two to go. I ate one for a late breakfast and had to save the other for lunch. They are so big you almost have to eat them off a plate; too hard to handle, otherwise. Only problem with Ken’s is the parking. We tried the other day, thinking that on a Friday morning at 9:30 surely we could get a parking place. Ended up at McDonalds. Sometimes that’s what happens when you are wild and adventurous.

How I really spend my time

Okay, I admitted that the spiel about my watching Oprah and Ellen and Dr. Phil wasn't really true. So what do I spend all my time doing? Here's the answer.

Thanks to Bonna for the link.

Free to a good family – of owls

We now have an owl house. It’s high up on the trunk of the “Bramblett” pecan tree in the back yard, waiting for an occupant. Or better yet, occupants. We first leaned about owl houses, or owl shacks from a newspaper article several months ago. A local ornithologist named Cliff Shackelford made a number of owl houses as gifts a couple of Christmases ago and the idea resonated with so many people that he now has a busy sideline making and selling owl houses. You can read all about it here. It’s an interesting web site even if you aren’t interested in putting up an owl house.

We were intrigued by the idea, thinking that it might add pleasure to those rare opportunities when we can comfortably sit on the back patio and drink coffee. Or just sit. We already feed most of the birds in North America out there, based on the seed hulls that cover the patio, and we’re going to add some hummingbird feeders at the back by Barbara’s office window. Plus, since owls like to eat snakes, maybe that is the solution for our Coral snake. Yes, “red and yellow kill a fellow.” Hmmm. I may have just effectively ended all visits by our grandchildren. Let me assure you, he is a very bashful snake. I read where some herpetologists never see a Coral snake in the wild in their entire careers. But that’s another blog topic.

Even though Mr. Shackelford lives in Austin, he lives way south in Austin – beyond Bubba land – and the shipping charges by mail were rather much, so we didn’t acquire an owl house until I noticed that you could buy them in the City of Austin store at City Hall. And that definitely is another blog topic. So house at hand, we trimmed some low branches to improve the fly-way for any home-seeking owl and nailed it up in the tree like this.

Mr. Shackelford claims that “Owls want to live in your back yard.” We shall see.