Green Day

Driving to work this morning, all the traffic signals on my route were green!  It was amazing.  My drive was reduced from 25 to 20 minutes, and my poor little transmission didn't have to shift in and out of second gear very much.  It really doesn't seem to like that part, so it was nice to have the car in 4th gear the whole way.  But the green-ness of the lights was so surprising in part because it wasn't even a close race - I wasn't speeding to catch the yellow light before it turned red.  I wasn't even speeding to catch the green before it turned yellow.  (Well, yeah that's true, except on the last signal.  By then I had fully realized that this drive had been different from all the others and I didn't want to wreck it.)  It was just green for me the whole way.  I've been driving that route since I started with this company in November 2002 and this is the first time I've even come close to a green day like today.

I think this is going to be a good day.

Hit in the head with a hangar door

I spent part of my weekend with a friend who was injured at work five
weeks ago. His doctor is telling him to expect to be out of work for
at least eight months, and last weekend was the first time he came out
to visit friends. He was hurting a little, but a little hurt in a lot
of places is exhausting. I wonder when will be the next time he does
that.

This is my friend who works as a ticket agent at the airport, whose
stories I love to hear. My husband and I have both missed his company
for the last several weeks. And his wife has been crazy busy running
him to therapy and doctors and homeschooling their 9-year-old daughter
-- so busy that she's made herself sick. She's been down for the
count for five days now, and she won't just stop and rest.

I hate to see suffering.

14 days

My health insurance reimburses me $150 each year if I go to the gym
120 times during the year. I haven't made it for two years. My
husband made it both years (though we missed out on the money the
first year due to a technicality). Our gym has a keypad where you
type in your numbers to log your visits.

So 120 visits to the gym over 12 months is only 10 visits per month.
I can do that, right? My year began on April 15, but by the end of
Month One I had only gone twice. I had also worked out twice more in
hotel gyms while traveling, but I haven't figured out how to count
those yet because they don't have the keypad logger thing in hotels.

So to get back on track, I need to go to the gym EVERY DAY for 14 days
in a row. Today was Day Three of this marathon. I'm so sleepy.

Whoa.

1. Follow the movement of the rotating pink dot - you will only see one color: pink.
2. Then stare at the black + in the center, and notice that the moving dot turns to green.
3. Now, concentrate on the black + in the center of the picture. After a short period of time, all the pink dots will slowly disappear, and you will see only a green dot rotating!
4. When you break your gaze, the green and pink dots will be separately visible for a short time.

It's amazing how our brain works. There really is no green dot, and
the pink ones really don't disappear. This should be proof enough, we
don't always see what we think we see.

Copied from here

Let the House Hunting Begin

I stumbled across a home for sale a few weeks ago that really caught
my eye. We called the number on the for-sale sign and asked if we
could see inside. The end result was that the house didn't work out,
but now we have our very own real estate agent.

We met with her and liked her, and she sent us a pile of listings to
look at. I thought my criteria were quite narrow so I was surprised
to see the number of listings that she sent over.

The plan for this weekend is to drive by some of them. It should be fun.

My Mom left this morning, after visiting for two weeks. We were very busy and had great fun:
- Longwood Gardens where we took over 150 photos
- Knocking screening which was quite impressive; I can't wait until it airs on TV in 2007
- Dinner at Blue Eyes, where the food was disappointing after they changed chefs, Devon, where you can't go wrong, Red Lobster, which is a classic in my family, The Stone Grille, which my husband hated and Mom & I loved, and several at-home adventures out of the Indian cookbook.
- Poseidon on IMAX, which was way too suspenseful and disorienting for Mom to relax but we enjoyed it
- Mom spent a day visiting an old, good friend and some sights in Patterson, NY, and she learned to hate the George Washington Bridge! She also had the joyful experience of showing her license, registration, and proof of insurance to New York's Finest - but it wasn't her fault: the policeman didn't know the car's registration was up-to-date since New Jersey stopped using registration decals on license plates.
- A trip to the library so Mom could start to catch up with her favorite author, Robin Cook
- Household chores which are always more fun when you have someone you love working alongside you
- Dinners with friends
- The ceremonial visit to Ikea where the cafe introduced us to this fabulous pear cider
- We tried to go to Rita's every day but only made it a couple of times. My new favorite is a Green Apple Gelati
- Mom's famous french pancakes. She has tried and tried to show me how to make them as thin as she makes them, but I think I must be missing one of the necessary genes
- Met together with our new real estate agent to begin the home-buying process

I am in love with the aviation industry.  I love hearing stories from my friend the ticket agent for United, I love selling my fuel test products to the airlines, I love flight attendant books....  I love this industry.  I would become a pilot if I had an extra week every month.

Southwest Airlines recently started a blog that I've subscribed to, and following a series of links from one recent post I ran into this excellent story about a groom who *barely* catches his flight:
http://www.blackfive.net/main/2003/09/why_i_love_sout.html