Oh, cat, don't fly away again. My head's killing me.

Absent again for too long -- I can never seem to post here unless I'm travelling! Since I have no travel plans until March, I better remedy this now & go over some of my adventures since you last heard from me somewhere in Germany.

I have travelled since then, though it was "only" to San Diego -- a trip I've taken so often it doesn't seem like going anywhere. A bit different this time, since for both Thanksgiving and Christmas I rode down there with my nephew Mike, who now has his own vehicle as he stumbles through his sophomore year at Cal State East Bay! [Jazz Hands]. I rode back with him (& his girlfriend, who also lives in San Diego & goes to school in SF) after Thanksgiving, & helped to guide them around the most horrible of the traffic on that Sunday. For Christmas I didn't want to stay as long, so I got a return flight -- first class on Virgin America! -- where I made the not-brief-enough acquaintance of this entry's title character (see title).

Good lord, I try not to complain, but she really was amazingly annoying from beginning to end. On boarding, she responded to the request not to block the aisles by plopping her oversized bags in the aisle and taking her sweet time putting them in the overhead bins. There was no set of headphones in front of her seat, so she grabbed the one in front of mine (fortunately I always pack earbuds, since the male stewardess flight attendant said he'd get another one for me and never came back. Cow flipped the flat-panel TV out of the armrest right after sitting down and wouldn't stow it until directly confronted by the female stewardess other flight attendant -- and then after takeoff she flipped it out again well before the announcement that it was okay to do so (I mean, hell bitch, it doesn't even function yet, why bother?)

In first class, they leave a pillow and blanket on your seat if you need it for the duration. When nobody was looking, she stuffed both of those into her bags. Well, ***I*** was looking.

My guess is she'd never flown first class before and is less seasoned to the experience than I am.

I will write about my adventures since returning from the Southland in a short while, and then, tomorrow, the Year in Review! I actually kept track this time. See you then!

1. I am bouncy, wired and witless as I recover from California Extreme, attended today with progbear. A wonderful event, even if the stench of 1980s fashion can never be completely concealed.
   
2. Also met there, e_ticket. I got a hug. Remember the episode of Beavis & Butthead where Beavis & Butthead get crushes on Todd? That's how I feel about e_ticket.
3. I am channel surfing and stumble on "the Marriage Ref" and think, is that Kathy Griffin or a Kathy Griffin-like senitent being? and the other sentient beings are professional show-business persons in the Industry? and this show is deliberately produced and doesn't just happen accidentally-like? and a lot of television does seems like somebody just dropped other TV shows down the stairs and was too lazy to clean up so they just called the broken pieces a TV show the way they laid?
4. Maybe it's just me, but if you're writing a commercial for a law firm that offers to sue on behalf of parents of children with birth defects, you might want to get an editor to go through the text and make sure it doesn't contain accidental rhyming couplets. It destroys the mood.
5. I stopped at WalMart on the way home and solved the age-old problem of not knowing which length of shoelace to buy with the simple gambit of buying one pair of each possible correct length. If you need shoelaces, I will have extras.