~ Georgia Griffith Yesterday's Entries 2000: Family Ties TODAY's FOOD Breakfast: Special K
& toast CURRENTLY READING The Oath TODAY on DVD Lost in Translation TODAY on TV Six Feet Under
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THE "FRIENDLY" SKIES 24 May 2004 I will never understand airline pricing. I’ve been watching the new Price Line ads (the ones where Leonard Nimoy takes over for Bill Shatner as The Voice of Price Line, and we learn that you can now get set low prices on Price Line). Now on this altered book round robin that we’ve set up--this is just entirely too much fun. I decided it’s like going back to grammar school again to play with glue and paints and collages, only with Mommy’s permission to write in the books. But the group (7 of us) has become quite chatty of late. We’ve never met each other and we decided that it would be fun, when all of our books have been finished, to get together...somewhere (we are spread out all over the country, from California to Virginia, from Minnesota to Texas) so we can deliver the last books in person, compare what we have all done on the books, and spend some time getting to know each other face to face. Sounds like great fun. We are still in the talking stage, trying to pin down dates and places. Two women have enough room in their homes to accommodate us all. One lives near Philadelphia, one outside Minneapolis. Just for ducks, I decided to find out how much it would cost to fly to each of those locations. I remember years ago when I was coordinating home stays for foreign students, I felt very sorry for them. They had signed up with The Experiment in International Living and one of the conditions was that they had no say in where they would be placed with an American family. Everyone wanted New York or San Francisco; nobody wanted Duluth, and most of the families who wanted to meet someone from another country lived in the midwest, so the kids had to agree to go wherever a family could be found for them. They would come here to California for orientation and 6 weeks of language training before being sent off on their home stays. The lucky ones flew from San Francisco to the east coast and could usually get a ticket for around $200-$300 at that time. The unlucky ones were sent to places in the midwest and couldn’t find anything under $600. It was my job to do the "exit lecture" before they left the language school, and to answer their questions and help prepare them for a successful home stay. I never could find a good way to explain to a kid from Brasil why he had to pay three times as much to fly to a place he didn’t want to go to in the first place! I’m feeling a little like that right now. I discovered, through Price Line that I can fly from Sacramento to Philadelphia for $296. It’s a long day, with a stopover in Minneapolis. BUT if I get on the exact same plane and get off in Minneapolis, it will cost me nearly $100 more!!!! For the life of me I can’t understand why I should have to pay $100 to get off the plane if the place I really want to go is Minneapolis. Yeah, I know it all has to do with hubs and traffic and stuff like that, but it all seems very silly to me. And I also realize that if I take only carry-on luggage and just kind of disappear in Minneapolis, I’ll probably be branded as a terrorist, so that’s not an option. Fortunately we seem to be leaning toward New Jersey (close to the Philadelphia airport) anyway. I’ve now done my part for three different altered books and sent them along to the next person on the list, and I’m sitting here antsy because I don’t expect to get my next book in quite awhile. We’re already talking about a second round robin and possible themes we might choose, so I may just pick a theme and start a book and hope that it’s one of the themes that gets chosen anyway. One reason I’m so antsy to start another project is that a Very Bad Thing happened yesterday. I normally don’t shop at Safeway, but I needed to get coffee from Peet’s, and Safeway is in the same mall, so I went there. I haven’t been in this Mall since I took pictures of SPCA dogs at PETCO and hadn’t really paid attention to the new shops that have opened up. Oh my lord..... Davis now has .... a craft store. A craft store that is walking distance from my house. I knew it was a mistake to go in. I wandered through the store, salivating over everything--having to remind myself that I no longer take film photos and haven’t done a scrapbook in years and that this is the time of my life when I’m trying to DEclutter instead of starting new projects. I was exercising great restraint, I thought, in choosing only a very, very few things--new products that it looked like it would be fun to use. Before I went to the check-out desk, I decided to total up how much I’d picked up in my very, very restrained trip through the store. $50 worth. Uh. I don’t think so. I carefully went around and put almost everything back. I came home with a bottle of Modge Podge, which I’ve never used before, and one rubber stamp, which looks to be versatile enough that I will probably use it a lot. That was a mere $12. But I did take note of what is there and know that as soon as I start working on a new project, I’m going to be going back. The clerk and I were talking about the tulip festival in Skagit Valley, since she spied a brochure I had in my bag, and we talked at length about that, after which I went home and sent her an e-mail with a link to the photos I’ve taken at the festival for the last few years. There was entirely too much bonding going on for someone who has no money to spend on craft supplies, and no place to put them if she buys them anyway. Especially not if we decide to meet in Minneapolis and I have to pay the damn penalty for getting off the plane!
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Created 4/30/04
