So I’m sitting at the gate in Long Beach, CA, about to hop a JetBlue redeye flight back to the right coast. On my drive back to the airport, I spotted one fire out in the hills as I got onto 405 North just after Laguna Canyon. Despite the haze, the soot and the smell, Laguna Beach is a damn nice place to be. Beautiful stuff. Sure, most of it was spent indoors in meetings, but we were able to step outside onto a porch off the meeting room and see nothing but palm trees and the vast, blue Pacific Ocean.

Getting caught up:

  • On the flight out here, I sat in the last row aisle, which sounds bad, but isn’t. JetBlue’s planes have the most legroom in the back of the plane, so it’s a no brainer for me. I’ll always take space over a quick exit, particularly for a 6 hour flight. Anyway, in the same last row across from me was a woman and her two teen children. When we were all sitting down and strapping ourselves in, I kept hearing small yelps. It sounded like it could have been a kid or a dog. The guy next to me asked me what the noise was and I could only assume it was the teen girl across the way. I thought she must have been developmentally disabled, because the mother kept saying “stop……stop…….don’t do that.” It was only three hours later that I discovered that they actually had a dog in a closed bag! Now, I really thought that this wasn’t allowed. Come to find out you can bring a dog on board with you provided it’s under a certain weight. I still don’t really get it, though. I thought the animal thing was about people with allergies, the potential for a dog getting loose and biting someone, or some other dog-related thing happenning. Yet here’s this little dog, yelping and in a bag. The bag had a fan on the end of it.
  • Our house odyssey is now over. We’ve successfully accepted an offer on our house and made an offer which was accepted on another house. We’re moving. A mile away. The only thing preventing it at this point would be if something came up during inspection that was a game-breaker and I don’t anticipate that happening. It will be tough to leave a house we put so much into, physically and emotionally, but it will be great to move into a larger place where we will, undoubtedly, create new memories.
  • I’m still not over missing the New Pornographers show last night in Boston to be here in CA. That hurts.