I have a wonderful little commute to my job. It is almost exactly eight miles each way and I can afford that, even at $4 a gallon. I can do five miles of it on the freeway and I often do and there usually isn’t any kind of back-up (knock on wood). Or, I can take the surface streets, which I occasionally do if I have errands or it’s snowing to beat the band. My favorite part of my commute is that I get to drive by the local airport both coming and going. It’s most exciting when somebody is taking off or landing right when I drive underneath them but I’ll take whatever I can get. If there’s a plane hanging out on the approach to the runway with its lights flashing, I know that the pilot is going through the checklist, waiting for clearance to take off. I used to do that with my dad when I was a kid, except that he’d be doing it without the benefit of a whole lot of electronical stuff and when he was done, he’d just yell out the window, “CLEAR”, and Sandy Sanderson would yell “CLEAR” back and we’d take off. Anyway. Then there are the planes that sit parked seemingly forever inside the fence beside the road. There’s one twin engine prop plane that I have never seen move. One slippery day last winter, there was ice hanging off its wings. Is it fly-able? I don’t know. Today (today!) I rounded the bend and… WAAAAH!!! The GOODYEAR BLIMP was sitting there, big as life! After a whole day of writing test cases! I really wanted to take a picture but I was in a moving line of traffic and it just didn’t work out. And you know? It is not at all unusual for the Goodyear Blimp to be at the Planet Ann Arbor Airport. The blimp hangs around the planet during most of the home UM football games and other times too. We even took the beach urchins out to the airport to see it up close once when they were babies. Do you guys remember? [you don’t have to comment] I will almost bet that it was there today in preparation for the all-too-soon-upcoming football season. Fall 2009 2008. Where did the time go? Anyway, as you might guess, sometimes it doesn’t take too much to make me happy.

I updated yesterday’s post after Pooh’s comment about the movie Cool Runnings. I was thinking about that movie the whole time I was writing about the Olympics but I couldn’t figure out how to work it into my post without making the whole thing even longer and rambly-er than it already was. I was kind of hoping it would get mentioned in the comments. I am really not a watcher of cutting-edge films. There was a period of time when we would watch movies over and over around here. I have watched Cool Runnings a whole bunch of times. We all knew the whole script to the BBC version of Anne of Green Gables. And there was the Lion, Witch, and Wardrobe series. And I forget what else. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with watching a comfortable, kid-friendly movie enough times to know the dialogue. What movies do y’all know by heart?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 13th, 2008 at 6:50 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.