Little Old Lady (Not) From Pasadena

If it happens once, it’s an anomaly.

Twice, it’s a curiosity.

Three times, and it earns a blog post.

— Karen’s philosophy on blogging.


The first time it happened, it was a lazy Saturday morning and I was on the highway named 280 traveling in a southward direction. The Good Man and I had just destroyed a stack of pancakes up at a restaurant in Millbrae, and were headed home.

I was behind the wheel, which is rare. The Good Man usually takes the wheel and I navigate (poorly).

We whistled along and were cussing and discussing something when I rounded a curve and lo and behold, there waited a member of that exclusive club, the CHP.

Instinctively, I touched the brake pedal to slow my roll, and as I did, I looked at my speedometer to see just how bad the ticket was going to be.

Turns out, I was going the speed limit. And my touching the brakes only slowed me to under the limit.

Oh. Well. That’s curious.

The second time I was driving across the great state of Georgia and I was singing along with the 80’s on 8 station on Sirius. The rental car was a Jeep and since I drive a Jeep back home, I felt pretty damn comfy in the car. The straight six has power and the Georgia highway was open and easy, begging me to test the bounds.

As I whipped past a slower car in the right lane, just as my wheels tap-tapped over the state line into Alabama, I saw the white cruiser in the median. One of Alabama’s finest was waiting there to nab speeders as they crossed over the border.

Again, I touched my brakes. Again, I looked at the speedometer to realize I had been going three over the speed limit of 70. Hardly enough for the Alabama man to get excited enough to leave the median.

Finally, the third event was just this weekend. Again on 280, this time headed to San Jose. Again a cruiser parked by the side of the road with a LIDAR gun aimed out the window. Again the brake pedal. Again, I was already in the legal zone.

What, exactly, has happened to me?

Once upon a time, I was quite a speed demon.

I was the girl who used to test what going 100mph felt like on the roads between El Paso and Carlsbad. (sssh, don’t tell my Mom)

I am the girl who used to get in trouble with her folks every time I came home from college because they would time me and I always arrived too early. (You’d think I would have figured it out and taken a lunch break somewhere to eat up some time)

This is the same chick that likes to race Mercedes up a hill. (My Jeep has pulling power, donchaknow).

And now I’m little Miss Goes The Speed Limit? Miss Little Old Lady Who Only Drives The Car To Church On Sunday? Little Miss Law Abider?

Evidently so.

Except for one red light infraction two years ago on a no good, very bad day.

Suddenly going the speed limit seems, mostly, like the right pace for me.

This depresses me a little bit. But just a little.

Soon I’ll invest in an elongated sedan and I’ll use the cruise control and I’ll huff and puff about all those damn kids driving too fast.

*sigh*







Image from the Gilroy Dispatch



That Bites

This is a photo of a regular ol’ highway overpass. This particular overpass happens to be in the vicinity of San Pablo Dam road which is in Richmond, California and is, give or take, twenty miles north and east of San Francisco on Highway 80.

Highway 80 being sort of a main thoroughfare from the East Bay and points farther north and east, such as Sacramento, where I was today for a work meeting. And then drove back home to the Bay Area this afternoon.

In this photo, if your eyes travel along that line to the head of the red arrow, you’ll see what looks like a bite has been taken from the underside of the bridge.

Check it.





That is not normal wear and tear. That is where a big rig hauling a crane violated the laws of both geometry and physics and perhaps California.

The Good Man texted me about this little snafooie at ten o’clock this morning.

By four o’clock this afternoon, traffic was still snarled and I sat there for an hour watching the needle on my gas tank drop. At four dollars a gallon, that burning fuel took a nice bite out of my pocketbook.

All due to that damn bite taken from the bridge. And of course the resulting scattered debris on the other side of the overpass.

This after my spectacular morning when I dropped my iPhone and cracked the screen.

Take all of this and add it together and you have my Wednesday. Which simply bites.

*sigh*

May Thursday treat me less like gum on the bottom of its shoe.




For more on the story, click here



Image copyright 2012, Karen Fayeth, and subject to the Creative Commons in the right column of this page. Taken with an iPhone4s with a cracked screen and the Camera+ app from a (slowly) moving automobile.



What Are The Odds?

Over the course of the past six months, I have had occasion to be on twelve different airplanes.

To my utter surprise, eleven of those twelve plane rides have gone off without a hitch. No mechanical failures. Nothing more than slight delays. Only a bit of notable turbulence over the North Pacific and also over Iceland. But even that was quite tolerable.

Eleven safe, easy, trouble free hops.

And then there came ol’ number twelve.

It had to happen sometime, right?

My day started in the dark hours of a foggy Alabama morning. I rose before the sun, packed my bag and climbed into the rental car. It was time to go home.

I had worried about a lot of the day. I had to drive the 75 miles or so back into Atlanta with commute time traffic. Atlanta is one of the busiest airports in the world so I fretted over planes being on time. And then there is the morass of the security process. It had taken almost an hour to get through SFO security on the way out so who knew was ATL would be like.

Turns out all of that worry was for naught. The drive in was easy. Turning in the rental car a breeze. There was a bit of a line at security but even that was no problem.

My biggest issue was that I had allotted so much time that I was ridiculously early to the airport.

So I had some breakfast, eggs and sausage hold the grits please, and I idly shopped the stores. I sat around a while too and even that was fine.

That big ol’ jet plane arrived right on time and in due course I was called to step onboard.

My seat wasn’t the best situation, I was in that first row at the plane door which meant every person who walked by took a chunk of my long limbs with them. I’m rather fond of my knees so I found myself hugging them to me to protect their little caps from further contusions. This made me cranky.

Soon enough the flight attendant was locking that door and running through the safety briefing required for takeoff.

She said at one point, “in the event of an emergency, which totally won’t happen, there will be lights along the aisle way leading you to exits.”

I thought it a bold statement. I should have known right then…she was calling down the Baseball Gods.

You know the Baseball Gods, those mythical entities that require you don’t speak of a no-hitter while it is in progress. The fickle hands of fate that will school you if you utter things like “when we win the division…”

And the baseball gods that occasionally smite a plane of passengers when our lead flight attendant says things like “in the event of an emergency, which totally won’t happen…”

Because it happened.

We were buckled in and cleared for takeoff. We taxied down the runway and took our place in line. There was one plane ahead of us and we were next. As the plane rolled, a man in the row behind me shouted, “we need help here! Get someone, we need help!”

The man seated at the window of that row was having a rather severe seizure. To his great fortune, the man seated next to me is a neurologist and there was also an anesthesiologist on the plane. These two doctors hopped into action and assisted the man through the worst of it.

Out of respect for the gentleman who suffered the seizure, I’ll keep all the gory details to myself, but I’m not going to lie, it was scary as hell.

The pilot was called and we had to step out of line and return to the gates where a group of EMTs waited. These EMTs were top notch, and they got the man stable and they got him off the plane.

Then there was the aftermath. The paperwork. The clean up. The “what the hell do we do now?”

All of the airline staff kept saying to each other “I’m just so glad this happened on the ground and not in the air.”

Eventually the airline got it all sorted out and the lead flight attendant commanded us to sit and buckle in. It was time to go.

We taxied out again to the runway and the passengers were quiet and tense. We took off and the wheels went up and other than the lady at the window in my row having a broken tray table and the bathroom running out of toilet paper, there were no more mishaps on that flight.

The pilot must have put the spurs to it because the flight was only maybe an hour late getting to SFO, and that’s not bad. Probably helped that prior to the emergency, we were due for a really early arrival (the jet stream must have been taking a smoke break yesterday).

And so…eleven out of twelve is a 91.6% chance of a flawless flight, which are damn fine odds as far as I’m concerned. I’d place a Vegas bet on that in a heartbeat.

I think what’s actually more amazing to me is the eleven flights that went off without a hitch. I’ve always considered getting on a plane to be something of a crap shoot. A little Google search advises that the odds of winning in craps is about 50%. So yeah, 91.6% is a far better bet.

As of this moment, there are no more plane rides scheduled for the rest of the year. Knock on wood and touch a lucky rabbit’s foot and with all due deference to the Baseball Gods.

I think I’m ready to stay on the ground for a while.






Photo by Jesse Clark and used royalty free from stock.xchng



I Hear You Calling

Oh, Atlanta/I hear you calling/
I’m coming back to you one fine day/
No need to worry/There ain’t no hurry/
cause I’m/On my way back to Georgia

— Atlanta, by Alison Krauss

Last month I typed into my Facebook status, “Holy crap. I’m actually in London” in the awe inspiring moments after I stepped off an airplane.

I considered typing something similar today.

I suppose “Holy crap I’m actually in Atlanta” holds a little less gravitas, but it’s no less sincere.

The holy crap comes to mind because it’s been a really long time since I was in beautiful Georgia.

Flying over the city I love to look out the window and I’m always amazed. Atlanta is so green. So many trees. So many old red brick buildings. Lovely!

I got a good adventure today, too. I picked up a rental car at the airport and got out on Highway 85 southbound. Today I drove across the left half of Georgia. It’s a jaunt that would take many, many hours in New Mexico, but turns out I only needed about 75 miles to get it done today.

The highway was wonderful. Smooth pavement, tall Georgia pines lining the route and well-tended velvety grass on both sides of the road.

I put my favorite Sirius station on the rental car radio and took a really nice drive.

It looked like this.





I love driving on easy open road. It’s very meditative. Some of my best thinking gets done on an uncrowded interstate.

And then after a little over an hour, I slipped over the border into Alabama and found my hotel.

This is the view from my hotel room. That is some big sky right there.




The population of this town is 7,897 and the folks here could not be any nicer. I took a drive around the town just to check it out and marveled at how pretty it is here in this little corner of Alabama.

Something so easy and so pretty about a warm summer night in the South.

And then I stopped off for a little dinner at a local institution.

Haven’t visited one of these in a while.





Feeling quite content, I’m back in my hotel and I’m smiling.

Atlanta may have been calling, but right now Alabama’s got my attention.

I was sort of worried about this trip, about the long drive and the weather and what this little town would be like.

It turns out I’m kind of having fun. On a work trip! Go figure.



Friend, Grant Me Absolution

It was, on a Fall day in 1988 that I first crossed paths with the girl who would become my best friend in the whole wide world. Mother of my god kids. Forgiver of all my aberrant behaviors. Supporter of my dreams.

She is the best.

It’s now twenty-four years later and she’s still closer than family and knows me better than I know myself.

Several months ago, over iced tea on her back patio near Radium Springs, she invited The Good Man and me to come out to New Mexico for a summer camping trip. Now I adore camping and was totally on board. The Good Man and I were already talking about flying or driving and how long we should stay.

And then life does what it does. It got in the way.

When my best friend asked me to spend some time in Quemado, it was February and I had nothing on the calendar that would inhibit a vist.

Five months, lots of overtime hours, and three countries later, my outlook wasn’t as clear.

So I was a bit sad to have to tell my friend that no, I wasn’t going to be able to go camping. I had just got back from London and The Good Man was up to his eyeballs in alligators with work too.

And money is always a question mark.

Damn it all to hell…we just couldn’t swing it.

I was supposed to be out there charring marshmallows and hiking where there is no mobile signal over this past weekend.

*sigh*

When I was still in flux about going, I happened to get an email from a joint called The Uptown Theatre in Napa. This is where I saw Rosanne Cash and Hugh Laurie and it’s rapidly become one of my all time favorite venues for live music.

Seems this little ol’ band called The Mavericks have reunited and were doing a show at the Uptown. The same weekend I should have been going camping.

The Mavericks are more than a fantastically talented band, they are an integral part of my life and the life of my best friend and our friendship. Their album “Music For All Occasions” is a landmark in our world. We love this band. A lot. Their music sums up a lot of what the late 1980’s and early to mid 1990’s mean to both of us.

It’s a soundtrack to our most cherished memories.

So when I saw they were playing a show nearby, I hedged my bets. All along, I planned to go to New Mexico, but I bought the not very expensive tickets too. If I lost out on the tickets in favor of New Mexico, so much the better. If we couldn’t swing camping, then The Good Man and I would take in a show.

Eventually we had to make the tough choice to stay back in California while my dearest friend and family went out to the woods and enjoyed the best of New Mexico.

Which meant The Good Man and I went to Napa. Being Catholic raised, the guilt was overwhelming. Both my best friend and my best guy should have been with me that night. It felt wrong to be at a Maverick’s show without her. Like I was being both a bad friend and a bad person.

That said, I still enjoyed the hell out of the show. This band is amazing! I last saw them back in 1998 when I had just moved to the state of California and seeing them live was a tonic to my confused, tortured soul. My friend and I lamented back then that she wasn’t able to come out for that show.

And here I went and did it again.

Gah!

Every day I’m checking the band’s webpage to see if they have added any dates. If they come anywhere near New Mexico or Northern California again, we’re are going! No if’s, and’s, but’s or international demands from my Boss.

We’ll bring the godkids too. They need to know what we know.

Confession is good for the soul, right? I hope so. I called my best friend yesterday but her phone went right to voicemail. That means she’s still out there where email and Facebook and all the rest don’t really matter.

If I don’t catch her by phone maybe she’ll see this post and know that I went and saw our favorite band without her (again!), but I was thinking of her the whole time. And that’s the truth.

Plus, I’ve done way worse things over the course of our twenty-four years and she’s forgiven me. I think we’ll be all good.

Should I tell her that I had tickets in the second row? Hmm. Maybe not.

Should I tell her that I met and had a nice chat with Robert Reynolds after the show? No, I probably shouldn’t.

That might be pushing it a bit.

_______________

A couple photos from the incredible show:




Lead singer, the amazing Raul Malo




Original members, reunited. Raul Malo (l), Paul Deakin (c), Robert Reynolds (r)



All images Copyright 2012, Karen Fayeth, and subject to the Creative Commons license in the right column of this page. Photos taken with an iPhone4s and the Camera+ App.