Me at Starbucks

I never know if people are entertained or annoyed by my behavior.

Me:  May I have this coffee ground for automatic drip?
Starbucks Guy: What kind of filter?
Me: Cone
SG: Paper or permanent?
Me: Waffle

Easter Egg Punt

Sometimes it's hard to overcome a basic pessimism about the future of American society. I am by nature pretty optimistic, but it's hard to look at societal trends and hold to that spirit. In my usual fashion, I am expounding on this topic based on a news story that I have not read nor have any intention of reading. This one is about the Easter Egg hunt gone awry (and by the way, I've always favored pronouncing that word aw'-ree).

In general, I hate the presence of stories like that in my newspaper, real or virtual. Why do I care about some stupid ritual in Colorado Springs? I don't, but I feel like a big part of what's screwing up this country is parents seeking to cushion every possible blow their kids might receive. I've certainly been guilty of this at times, but I've learned my lesson. Not only can't it be done, it shouldn't be done. If a kid doesn't learn how to cope with the searing psychic pain of not finding an Easter egg, how are they going to be able to cope when something bad actually happens, like if their best friend moves to Des Moines or they get a B on a history term paper.

Parents, of course, have the right to psychologically cripple their kids; it's so difficult to avoid that inflicting some kind of damage is almost a job requirement. But whatever mistakes I've made have at least come as a mistaken conclusion to some thinking process. It's the lack of thought by what seems like a vast segment of Americans that scares the bejeezus out of me (always wanted to use that phrase...).

This is kind of a deep and complicated topic for this blog, and I don't have time to follow through on it right now, but I will in the near future.

Day three

This day, I must say, made the whole trip worthwhile. I got up not to early, had breakfast and checked out of the motel. Since I now seem to be able to handle long walks, I wanted to find a place where I could be on the beach for a bit, but didn’t feel like doing the whole same thing again, so I headed in the other direction and quickly found myself on a bridge to a little island called Sand Key. I didn’t know anything about Sand Key, but something led me to believe there would be a beach there. Once over the bridge I saw a sign pointing to a beach/park, so in I went and found this wide and almost shockingly underpopulated expanse of sand. I walked its entire length until I was standing at the edge of the island directly across from the motel.

It was absolutely perfect out- maybe 80 degrees with a breeze. I couldn’t believe my good fortune being there. After a couple of minutes, I made my way back down the beach and to the bridge. As I approached the main part of Clearwater Beach I could see pelicans diving into the bay. By the time I got close to the end of the bridge I could hear the splash as they hit the water.

The walk took over an hour, so I got in my car and headed back to the ballpark. I found the main approach from the south side kind of unpleasant, so I tried coming from the north this time, and found a remote parking lot in the woods for half the price of the regular lot. I realized as I walked out that these woods comprised a disk golf course. I’d never watched people play disk golf before- it was pretty impressive. I almost got hit with a stray disk, leading to a conversation with a couple of other parkers about whether disk golfers said “fore” to alert others. We decided “look out dude!” was more likely.

Today’s game was again mildly diverting. I never spent a moment in my seat, but hung out either on the grassy knoll in centerfield or somewhere in the shade. By this point, although I wasn’t seriously burnt I had been in the sun for most of the peak hours for the past 2 days. So once the game was over (it ended in a tie, a charming result that happens only during spring training), I decided not to return to the beach, but found a Starbucks to get some work done. Even this was kind of calming, because it meant I wouldn’t be stressing out about for the rest of the day.

The flight back was uneventful, just the way you like them. The one oddity is that I bought a salad to eat on the plane for dinner. First the gate agent, then each of the flight attendants tried to get it away from me. I’m not sure they’re feeding those people enough.

I was sitting next to two guys who were talking business the entire flight. After about 20 minutes of office politics and how they were facing up to their challenges and their incompetent supervisors I had to put music on LOUD to drown them out.  I’m so glad I don’t do that stuff any more. It sounds so frustrating and dreary.  These people feel like their problems are unique, but every single thing they said was something I’d heard (or said) a dozen times before.

Finally got to eat my salad undisturbed and arrived in Philly right on time. Nice trip.

Day two

Today I really wanted beach time, so as soon as I got up and eat some breakfast and then headed up to the nice part of the island. The sand in Clearwater is absolutely spectacular and it's wonderful just to feel it under my feet.

While I was lying on the beach I had a suddenly realization about why I ‘d been feeling so crappy and hadn’t felt like writing anything during the prior week. I was so busy and stressed out that my mind never had a moment to wander and free associate. Everybody needs something to keep them centered, and my stream of consciousness is what keeps me going and makes me feel alive. I have a very active and chatty inner voice and when I can’t hear it I kind of lose myself. Lying on the beach, with nothing around except the sun and the sound of the Gulf’s mini-waves, I could wander. I need to make sure that I take some time for that no matter what is going on.

I lay in the sand until around noon, and then decided I would go see another ball game after all. So off I went to Dunedin.

I was going to see the Atlanta Braves play the Toronto Blue Jays at their stadium in Dunedin, so I put Toronto Blue Jays Dunedin to my phone and followed the directions. Much to my annoyance, unlike every other team in Florida. The Toronto Blue Jays do not have to stadium anywhere near their offices which is where I arrived about 10 minutes before gametime.

Muttering under my breath, I tried another way of finding where the game was and found out I had to go back in the direction I had already come. This displeased me. Didn't help that half the roads were closed and I had to detour everywhere.

Call the parking lot attendants I saw this weekend were really pleasant and chatty. When that guy asked me how I was doing I said I was glad to be here after swinging buy the offices first. He nodded knowingly, and I said "it's especially annoying because I came right by here." He said, I know, I saw you. Cute.

Actually the whole thing was cute. They play in a municipal ballpark with the snappy name of Florida Auto Trader Stadium. It was generically pleasant and had one of my favorite minor league ballpark features, the Rotary Club barbecue. I had some grilled chicken and baked beans, so I was on my way.

At Bright House Field they serve Yuengling for the Philly folks, so here they have Labatts Blue for Canadians. Both parks had a new beer dispensing gimmick where the bottom of the cup has a magnetic seal which opens when inserted in a special apparatus, allowing the cup to be filled for the bottom up. Cool to watch.

The game itself was mildly diverting, with Toronto absolutely pummeling the Braves’ rookie pitcher. The most notable thing was that because of the preponderance of left-handed hitters in both lineups, the right field stands where I was sitting was getting peppered with baseballs. I nearly got hit when I had my back turned coming back from the bathroom.

Usually I like to stay until the end of games, but spring training doesn’t have rael games. They’re glorified practice sessions and the teams typically start taking their regular players after 6 innings or so. When the Phillies do that I’m usually interested in seeing the minor league replacements, but here I could care less, so I left after 7 innings. I cruised back through downtown Dunedin, which had the main street block off for what seemed to be a junk festival. Kind of like a two block-long yard sale.

The town was cute and I wouldn’t have minded hanging out, but it was difficult to get around with all the piles of knick-knacks lining the street. So I headed back to my room to ready myself for another night of beachness. I decided to walk this time, taking advantage of how much better my leg has been feeling to feel the air and see the people milling about. It was incredibly busy, not so much with spring breakers, but with what seemed like local families. My motel was full of such weekenders, large groups of large, loud people.

After about an hour of walking around, I decided to have dinner and went to the local landmark known as Crabby Bill’s. As I had the night before, I used my special party-of-one powers to sit at the bar right away while the hoards of larger parties waited outside. The food was informal and tasty and the bartender was surprisingly pleasant for a place called crabby. I hung out and watched basketball for a while and then walked back to my room and eventually went to bed.

The Florida trip- Day one

Once again, I am off traveling solo. My wife and daughter are on the road looking at colleges and I have a 3 day weekend, so I decided to hop a flight down to Florida and enjoy the sun and a few baseball games. It seemed like a nice relaxing type trip, which I definitely needed.

I happened to be flying first class on the way down, thanks to the general idiocy of airline fares. I made the reservation kind of late, and at that particular moment first class tickets were $170 cheaper than coach, so I wasn't going to argue. The fortuitousness of this selection did not hit me until I got to the airport and saw the security line stretching nearly all the way to the parking garage. Note: this is not an exaggeration; the line went beyond the far end of the moving sidewalk. But the First Class security line was about 15 people.

I've had my issues going through security recently, mostly because on a couple of occasions I had my garage door opener, which seems to set off all kinds of alerts, in my jacket pocket. One time, they ran it through the x-ray 3 times and then went off to manually inspect it.

Then last time I flew they wanted to put me in a glass cylinder and irradiate me. When I refused I was scolded by the TSA agent for saying "I ain't going in that thing." when apparently I'm supposed to say "I request a hand screening." Pardon me for speaking like a human being instead of a robot, or someone just out of TSA training.

The hand screenings are a bit time-consuming but I haven't found them to be particularly unpleasant, especially since they've been patting me down every time I've entered a sporting event lately. At least these guys seem to know what they're doing. My favorite part was he decided that he had to run one of those bomb detecting swabs all around the Ace bandage that I have on my calf these days.

The flight itself was fine, and I got to the Phillies park well before the game. I went to my first spring training in 1976 and it's gotten a lot slicker since then, but it's still nice to see big league ballplayers in small parks when nobody is taking the proceedings too seriously.

From there I went to my hotel, which is laughingly called a Resort. It's not like there's anything wrong with it. The rooms are large and well equipped, but to me a Resort is a place where there's a variety of activities and amenities. Here, they have a pool, but the only activity I can find is doing laundry. It's a motel. There's miniature golf a block away and the beach is across the street, but you have to make your own fun. Then again, as David Mamet notes in State and Main, if you don't make it yourself, it isn't fun, it's entertainment.

In the interest of making some fun, I took the little trolley up to the main beach area and lay on the sand for an hour or so. And then when I got up to head back, I suddenly realized that my wallet was missing.

I completely freaked. At home it would be an irritation, but on the road by yourself with no credit cards and no money? I retraced all my steps in and around the beach but found nothing. As I got back close to the street, trying to figure out what to do, I saw a trolley go by and went running after it, (note to those who have been following the adventures of me and my reluctant right leg,yes, I actually ran). I flagged it down and asked the driver if someone had left a wallet on a trolley and she replied musically, to my ears anyway, "Are you Frank?"

So yes, I'd left it on the trolley and another driver was driving around with it. He was all the way on the other end of the island, so I had to wait a half hour for him to make his way back, but he had it and nothing was missing. Amazing. Completely lucky.

I headed over to Frenchy's Rockaway Grill, my favorite spot around here, and had a grouper sandwich to celebrate my good fortune. Then back to my room for a night's sleep with nothing planned for the morning.

Getting back online

Headed for Florida tomorrow for a weekend of baseball. Will have some time to write while I'm there.

Just checking in

I know I haven't written anything for a while. I am respecting the privacy of others, and it prevents me from giving any details of what I've been doing.

For myself, I'm fine. I'm even walking pretty much normally. Things are going as well as one might expect and I will be back at work next week.

Promenade with your partner

The origin of the prom is in an old fashioned promenade, a leisurely stroll around the parlour where you show off your partner to the assembled nobility. I'm not sure if they still do it but when I went to the Kirov Ballet in 1977, between acts everyone would promenade. They had a big long room with no purpose other than for walking around the perimeter (there was a carpet ringing the room), which is what the entire audience did. It was quite charming actually.

Now, of course, proms have taken on an exaggerated importance because people just don't hold balls the way they used to in all those Jane Austen books. Plus, now as part of the Global War on Fun (TM), everything about proms is tightly controlled. Nobody can arrive late or leave early. In some cases the students are detained afterwards for a mandatory group activity until early the next morning. This means that if anyone is intent on getting a buzz or some nookie, they'll need to be very surreptitious and creative. I have no suggestions to make in this regard, but I'm guessing today's youth is up to the challenge.

Tonight we had one of the Junior Pre-Proms for my daughter's school here. As I noted to one of the parents, this was the most kids we'd ever had at the house when we were home and aware that there were kids there (so sorry, no beer pong this time).

The scene was really quite entertaining. There were about a dozen couples and then one or more parent for each of them, armed with one or more cameras apiece. I can't even guess how many pictures were taken all told. I brought out a stool so that the shorter people could see what was going on. And the scene was happily chaotic, so much so that our dog, who's a herder and usually actively involved with whatever is going on, finally gave up and lay down under the dining room table.

Fortunately, there were no mishaps. One girl caught a heel on her dress on the stairs but fortunately just fell onto the half-landing. Nobody spilled anything on themselves or had a hair mishap. Nobody got stuck with a corsage or boutonniere pin. We overbought food but there were enough boys there to use most of it up.

My daughter, who had been fretting about her hair for weeks, got a wonderful up-do that she loved. Her date was a very nice young man with hearty handshake. He's one of those guys who shakes your hand by swinging his arm around and slapping his hand into yours. It's very pre-professional (the girls referred to it as being a CEO handshake). I was just wondering where a kid learns to do that. I couldn't find lessons on Youtube anywhere.

After a half hour of groups forming dissolving and reassembling, they all at once decided it was time to leave, and off they went. I stayed at home to clean up, of which my favorite part was finding empty corsage and boutonniere boxes in every conceivable place. Two were under the couch, one was behind the TV. The rest were stashed on every available horizontal surface. But within an hour the house was back to normal and it was time to go pick them up.

Getting there

Following up on a discussion I had recently, I would like to present the definitive essay on the Interstate Highway System (IHS). By definitive I mean researched in a thoroughly cursory manner and embellished by amplifications, selective use of data, statistically unsupportable extrapolations and my own opinions. That is what definitive means, right?

Like most important parts of 21st century life, the IHS was developed during my lifetime. I saw numerous pieces of it evolve from plans to concrete. When I moved to Philadelphia, one of the first things I read in the Inquirer was a humorous essay about I-95 in the Sunday Magazine, which is no longer published. It was done in a Q&A format and the first question was simply, "What is I-95?" Answer: "I-95 is a highway that runs from Maine to Girard Avenue and from the Philadelphia Airport to Florida."

The IHS was born in the aftermath of WWII from the mankind's typical instinct to develop strategies to fight the previous war. Then-President Eisenhower, a military guy by trade, decided he needed a system of limited access roads (as in, have entrances and exits rather than intersections with streets) with which we could move troops and equipment by road from, say Los Angeles to Washington DC without stopping at 15,000 traffic lights on the way. Building began in the early 1950s and continues to this day.

Although many parts of the Interstates have names, (the entire system is named after Eisenhower), most are known only by their number. The numbering system was designed to complement the US Highway system, keeping odd numbers going North-South and evens East-West, but reversing the direction of numbering. For example, I-95 is the easternmost interstate and US 1 the easternmost US route. The only oddities in this system are in the middle of the country, where they skip numbers to avoid having, for example, both US Route and Interstate 60 in the same state. We the people are presumed to be unable to distinguish one from the other, yet another way the government restricts our first amendment right to worship the religion of automobile usage.

Also, because the country irregularly shaped, not all the roads go all the way from east to west. I-90, for example, starts  in Massachusetts, but when the Great Lakes push the northern border south, it merges with I-80, only to reappear in Chicago and continue to Seattle.

The numbering of the main routes is a model of simplicity compared to the numbering of the connecting routes. In this area, the main connectors are I-476 and I-676. In Pennsylvania, both of these connect I's 76 and 95, but one runs east-west and the other north south. To make things more confusing I-476 also connects 276, 78, 80, 84 and 81. And east-west 676 disappears at the Delaware River and reappears in New Jersey, running north-south and connecting 295 and another piece of 76.

The code for numbering connectors, which is more guidelines than an actual code, are that connectors that intersect interstates at both ends get even numbers and those that don't have odd numbers. This code is violated frequently depending on convenience. New Jersey's version of 676 has no connector on its north end, but I-195, the road to Great Adventure in New Jersey, is more the way it should work.

The IHS was build with either willful ignorance or blatant disregard of the consequences of road building. The first rule is that new roads attract new traffic, and the consequence is that they almost never alleviate traffic problems. The most common mistake is the notion that building interstates to funnel traffic into a city are counterproductive. Roads that connect, for example, northern and southern suburbs to an urban core also allow people to commute from the north to the south as well. Locally, the Schuyllkill Expressway, now I-76, was built solely for the purpose of bringing people from the suburbs into Center City. But it didn't take long for people to figure out that they could also use it to commute from South Jersey to King of Prussia. Hence more traffic than anticipated.

Even more tragic is when the interstate merely passes by a city or town, cutting it off from the traffic and starving it economically. But that's a long, sad, complicated story and not one I care to expound on right now.

A little hectic

Been a bit too busy to blog recently. My main activity, aside from school stuff, has been to make all of the reservations for my daughter's college visiting trip. This means finding hotels in a bunch of places ranging from small midwestern towns to big northeastern cities. It's pretty remarkable how many pretty much identical-looking places you can find.

When I was a kid, chain motels didn't really exist. Motels were typically somewhat shabby little places owned by some guy or some family. Then at some point, around 1950 or so, someone realized that the lack of any kind of consistency was an opportunity. His idea was that travelers want predictability, an idea that has been borne out in many forms (for example, McDonalds or Starbucks). So he built a few motels, developed standards and franchised the idea nationally as Holiday Inns. His timing was excellent. The Interstate Highway System was being built and Americans were taking increasing numbers of driving vacations over increasing distances.

Holiday Inns were so revolutionary that the guy (Mr. Wilson, I think) was featured on the cover of Time Magazine. Now, of course, there are a huge number of chains offering precisely calibrated different levels of service. Holiday Inn itself has 3 different levels (that I've stayed in, anyway) and owns a luxury hotel chain as well.

So making these reservations, I'm barraged by an almost incomprehensible array of places to sleep. In even a decent size city there are usually at least 3 types of Hiltons, Marriotts and Holiday Inns, along with all the usual suspects. How do I choose between a Hilton Garden Inn (none of the hotel photos ever show a garden) or Courtyard by Marriott (likewise for courtyard photos)? Or a Holiday Inn Express, whatever that means. I understand what an express train or bus is. I even understand the black-is-white logic of calling US Airways' local partners US Airways Express even though there's nothing "express" about them. But what in the world is an express motel? I am genuinely befuddled. I don't think that word means what they think it means.

The funny thing, of course, is now that the vast majority of motels are part of chains, the older, more individual places have more attraction, at least for me. The vast majority of the places I picked are not chains. I always keep in mind that Stevie Wonder, the blind singer, always stayed in Holiday Inns on tour because every room was identical and he could find his way around easily. That just never seemed attractive to me, but it appears I'm in the minority.