Blogging etiquette (in honor of Alice)

As an interlude, it has come to my attention that a bit of education might be necessary about blogs.  By "come to my attention," I mean that moment when my mother-in-law said "You're going to send me an email every time you post a blog right?"

Um.  No.

The whole point of a blog is that is's a convenient way to put a lot of information out there in one fell swoop and then forget about it.  It's sort of on you if you want to see it.  As noted in my first post, I'm hoping to avoid focus, work, and awareness of my environment over the next three months.  Blogging and THEN sending an email constitutes all three.

And yet, it's my mother-in-law.

In an effort to solve this quandary, I reached out to my R&D team who discovered a revolutionary new tool called "follow by email."  It should be over there at the right.

Pretty basic stuff for a pretty basic blog. 

Hell or How We Got to Australia Part I

I suppose now is as good a time as any to fill you in on the trip, which will simultaneously fill you in on the reasons that it took seven days to post a post.

I spent a lot of time (about three minutes while I was making a gin and tonic) trying to come up with suitable metaphors or imagery that would really capture the experience.  A lot of the good ones have already been used.  Fire, sulphur, brimstone, 24 hour marathons of The Bachelorette including the one where Ben was totally devastated by Kaitlyn sending him home after he finally found a way to love.  Although those were all completely apt, this is what I eventually came up with …

This is a small metal can.

This is a monkey.

This is a thousand monkeys on methamphetamines who think they are being followed by the FBI.

Strapped into a small metal can at the height of Mt. Everest next to a thousand tweaking monkeys for thirty six hours.  That was our trip.  I spent a lot of time looking out the window longing for the cabin to depressurize.  But it didn't start there ...  

Three days before we left, Tessa spent twelve hours vomiting on whatever surface was handy.  This, luckily, did not include me or the dog, but everything else was fair game.  As Amy and I googled “How long are you contagious after you vomit” and "How do you get vomit out of cheap stuffed animals" and "Are you a bad person for flying after vomiting" I began to regret my mockery of our travel agent and his unreasonable recommendation for travel insurance.

So a quick word from our sponsor.  

TRAVEL INSURANCE.

Think about travel insurance if you have kids.  Really really think about it.  Because you can tell yourself that NO MATTER WHAT I AM GETTING ON THAT DAMN PLANE and you might be right.  You could force yourself to sit hunched over a paper bag for twelve hours begging for ginger ale whenever the drink cart passes and watching Tom and Jerry cartoons (there were 45 of 'em).  But you can’t really tell that to a clammy and sweaty six year old who is squatting in front of the toilet, her face the color of a lime gone bad, saying “daddy my stomach doesn’t feel good.”  No, instead you rub her face vigorously with a cold cloth and comment on how much better her color looks while trying not to hyperventilate.  You do this while your wife looks at you disapprovingly (this is not unusual).

The other hard part was the reflexive and obsessive tendency to scrutinize every ache and twinge in my body to determine if I might be joining the Tessa team.  I couldn't tell whether I was developing nausea or whether I've always been nauseous and just didn't realize it.  And the more I talked about it, the sicker my wife looked.  Again, this is not unusual.

Shockingly, the rest of us managed to keep it down, so to speak.

We made it to the bus which made it to Boston and settled down in our gate area with some Uno cards.  I should mention here that my friend Todd recently went to Australia and recommended that I use Seat Guru to ensure that we get good seats or, at least, don't get the seats at the back of the plane that don't recline.  I did that.  I logged on to Seat Guru (several times), ensuring that we had reclining seats.  I'm pretty sure I did that for our entire trip.  Except the first six hour leg.

So let's just say what we're all thinking.  Engineers who design airlines are sadists.  First, they force you to walk through business class, just to give you that sense of vast space and comfort and attractive people doing interesting things.  Then you move through economy plus, to give you that sense of compact but livable space and slightly less attractive people doing less interesting things.  Then Economy, where people survive.  As you move to the back of the airplane, space compresses until you pass the event horizon and reach the non-reclining seats, where light and hope cannot escape.  The kicker?  These non-reclining seats are positioned RIGHT IN FRONT OF THE BATHROOMS, which doesn't seem too bad until you see that guy who ordered the double bean burritos at Chilis headed your way.