Sunday, December 31, 2006

Friday, December 22, 2006

Rolling with the Denver Blizzard

Of course we had a flight on United Airlines today, through the Denver airport on our way to Edmonton. As you all know the Denver Airport closed on Wednesday the 20th due to severe blizzard conditions and snow. They've since gotten about 2' of snow and if any of you are familiar with the airport you know its in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by miles and miles of rolling prairies. They plow the runway and 30 minutes later there are huge drifts on it again. Read the latest on Denver here. My company apparently has several people stuck in the Denver airport. What a sad place to spend 2 nights sleeping on the ground.

After trying for over 3 hours on Thursday to get thru to United (and being disconnected repeatedly by their systems) I gave up and called my trusty Mitel travel agent. Evelynne was wonderful as always, found us a flight on WestJet for $550 round trip and its direct! No where near Denver. We fly into Calgary and my family will come pick us up. You have to roll with the punches.

How am I going to get back the 80,000 miles that I spent getting our award tickets to Canada in the first place on United? Since I couldn't get thru for love nor money yesterday, I waited until midnight last night and called the 800#. Got right through. Talked to a lovely black woman who sounded like she was either drunk or stoned and she told me all the horror stories from the day. I asked her if she'd been drinking and she said just water. But she said that water and vodka are the same color. She was very colorful herself and we had a fun go of it. I'm just hoping my miles are back in my account.....

Monday, December 11, 2006

Cappuccino for Cops?


Or has the United States left every child behind?
This sign was in the mini mall near my house.

Friday, December 08, 2006

My Calculator

It's weird how we hang on to the strangest things. I have this Sharp scientific calculator that I know I had in Winnipeg, MB when I was in University or before. I must have bought it for the abstract calculus classes in the Computer Science program. I hated that class..... The calculator was state of the art at the time. Now they make calculators that graph for you right on the screen, but I digress. So if I bought this calculator around 1981-1983 its about 25 years old. I'm just ripping the batteries out of it now because it's dead. I have to buy new ones and I'm going to. Why throw it away? It's still very useful. I still use it, although not as much. I use the calculator on the computer more even though I hate that one.

This quote comes to mind: Usefulness is not impaired by imperfection. You can still drink from a chipped cup. Or in this case, an old calculator.....

Wednesday, December 06, 2006