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Monthly ArchiveJune 2008



Life &Work by Spencer on June 18, 2008

To Houston and Back – The Sequel

Second verse, same as the first?

Well, not exactly, but close enough.  I’ve decided that Houston doesn’t like me.  Yesterday, I had another client in Houston that I had to fly out to meet with.  I scheduled the same flights as before so that I could do all of my travel in one day.  Last time, if you recall, my flight was stranded mid-air and we were diverted to Austin and I missed my meeting and flew straight home as soon as I finally landed in Houston.  This experience wasn’t quite that bad, but it wasn’t good either.

The flight from Vegas to Houston was uneventful and we even arrived a little early.  Great.  I was able to meet up with my co-worker and we got to the meeting and the meeting went well.  Great.  Afterward, got to have Chick-Fil-A to eat.  AWESOME!!! Highlight of the day!  Got to the airport to fly home… and this is where the story unravels once again.

My plane was supposed to leave around 6:44 pm CDT and arrive in Vegas at 7:52 PDT.  I would have gotten home before 9:00 easily and still had some time to relax before bed.  Around 6:30, we hadn’t boarded yet and they finally changed the departure time from 6:44 to 7:16.   Not a big deal, that happens.  We board the plane and after everyone is on and they’ve closed the door, we get an announcement.  “Thank you for flying with us, we’ll be at the gate here for 30 minutes or so.”  Upsetting but whatever.  30 minutes pass by and the voice comes over, (using valley girl paraphrasing from our captain) “Umm, yeah, like there are 4 planes behind us blocking us in so, like, we’ll be another 30 minutes here.  Y’all can use your cell phones if you want to call anyone… oh and by the way, once we pull from the gate, we’ll taxi for about another hour before we take off, there were like, awesome storms that came through.  Totally cool, huh?”

About 45 minutes later we push from the gate and get the message (no paraphrasing). “Greetings from the flight deck, we’ve pushed from the gate.  You can probably feel us moving now.  It’ll still be about an hour before we take off as there are a lot of flights ahead of us due to the storm that passed by.”  That’s great, come on the speaker just AFTER we start moving to tell us we’re moving.  Our captain was a real winner, I think she liked the sound of her voice on the PA.

Now we’re on taxi and again the captain comes online and says, “If you’re on the left side of the plane you can probably see the really long line of planes we’re behind and that magnificent storm in the distance.”  I don’t care.  We’re on the taxi with the engines off, it doesn’t really matter how many planes are ahead of us.

30 minutes later, still on the taxi, the captain graces us with her presence again, “I’ve been asked to move the plane up so I’m going to start the engines and move.”  Did we really need to hear that?  Come on.  Around this time, almost 2 hours of sitting on the plane, they come around and offer a glass of water.  Great customer service.  Couldn’t they have at least run some programming on the TV’s during this wait; or even better not board the darn plane until we could have pushed away.  Continental’s customer service leaves much to be desired from my last two experiences.  It’s one thing to have delays, but the way the staff handles them could make things much more bearable.  Continental gets a D for service.

40 minutes later we’re taking off and I seriously hear clapping behind me.  What the ??? You’re clapping because we’re taking off 2 and a half hours late?  What an accomplishment!  As we’re just getting airborne, the flight attendant comes on and says, “Thanks for handling the short delay, we appreciate your business.”  Short delay, as if to say it could have been worse; which yes, it could have, but don’t try to placate me by pointing that out.  We took off around the time I should have been landing in Vegas.

The flight was uneventful from that point and I got home around 11:00.  Missed the entire Celtics game and any reasonable time with Kylah before bed.  Houston just doesn’t like me apparently.

I’m sure that when the time comes to fly again to Houston, I’ll be able to complete a saga.  Stay tuned!

Life by Spencer on June 3, 2008

House Hunting – We’ve Moved!

So now comes the final chapter in our house hunting adventure… we finally moved in yesterday.  There were issues with worry all the way up until last Friday when things finally recorded.  Title was still working on some money issues due to a rate lock extension and the seller had forgotten to sign some documents but those all got worked out in the nick of time.

Originally, our plan was to rent a truck and move ourselves.  We had thought about hiring movers but decided against it.  Last week we changed our mind and did hire some movers… boy was that the smart thing.  Without them there is no chance we would have gotten everything over in one day.  No chance.

Even with the movers, Kylah and I were busy moving smaller stuff and keeping things organized.  Connor and Grandpa spent the day together hanging out at the houses.  Grandpa was amazing to keep company with Connor and Connor was just the bestest little boy in the world.  He took one nap in his stroller after he had been up for 5 hours and didn’t complain at all.  His second nap was in the new house just as soon as we got the crib and even though it was a new house and totally new environment, he went down like a champ!  I couldn’t have been any prouder.

There are still some outstanding issues.  We are getting our RO system serviced and Cable phone installed today.  We will need to get garage door openers and a mail key.  With bank repos, many of those types of items get lost in the shuffle and it is up to the new owners to correct.  Something we’ll take care of soon but at least we are all moved in.

Overall, we are over a major hump and that is very satisfying.  The new house already seems to fit us well and I’m excited to be there for many years to come.