The View From 10,000 Feet

So it's been a while. I've had two back-to-back horrible MFWs and the shame of cheating my way through them has made me unwilling to post. But maybe that's "ok".

This holiday season, plus the end of the semester, plus some long-distance travel with my in-laws has made me kind of stressed out. It's good to leave the house. At least I keep telling myself that. Meanwhile, I've been on a rampage of spending, eating, and media distraction. Sigh.

I caught some media about air travel disasters after getting back from the beyond. We had just had a tense 40 hours of travel in which 2 of our flights were canceled, one because of a volcanic eruption (yes!) and another because of "the electricity [in the plane] 'just went out'". That was just before a flight that was supposed to cross 10K-15K ft. tall mountain range, at night, in the rain, with cotton-ball like low hanging clouds.

Anyway, when we were abroad I didn't have email, phone, TV, or internet for whole week. Everything I did see was in another language. One of the big takeaways from the experience was an appreciation for how high the barriers of communication really are in much of the world. If you base your assumptions about telecommunications from hanging out on the East coast of the US then you are bound to miss a lot.

Anyway, "over and out".