Author: Patrick Rhone

Been feeling really stuck lately. So many events have occurred recently on so many opposite ends of the spectrum. It seems for every good event in my life I have one that is so disheartening that it really takes away my ability to feel motivated to do anything at all.
I returned yesterday from a really great trip to Washington DC. My father lives there and Princess Bethany and I have many friends that live out that way to. Despite the inclement weather (icy and sleet ridden due to a nor’easter that blew through – more on that later) we managed to see a lot of the sights and spend the quality time we wanted to with friends and relatives. A really great time had.
Of course, as said previously, lately it seems that life can’t let me have a good time without giving me something horrible to balance it. It turns out that the nor’easter mentioned earlier caused major airline cancelations on Thursday and Friday while we were in DC. In turn, stranding over 100,000 people. many of them at Philadelphia International Airport, where it just so happened we were due to connect through to Minneapolis/Saint Paul (where we live) on Sunday. Are you asking how that bad weather on Thursday caused any issues for me on Sunday? Well, here is how…
When the nor’easter that hit the east cost on Thurs/Fri caused all the airlines to cancel flights, the solution that U.S. Airways came up with to get those people, now stranded for days, to their destinations was to cancel a slew of regular flights on Saturday and Sunday (i.e. mine) to cover those rebookings. Smart, huh? Here is the deal… The airport industry runs their fleets with as few flights as possible these days in order to ensure that every flight is full. In fact, more often than not, they overbook as it is cheaper to bump people than to risk a less than full flight. Therefore, when weather issues cause cancelations, there is no “breathing room” and it causes a domino effect. People like myself flying on Sunday arrived in Philly to find our flights had been cancelled. As a matter of fact, the real kicker is that they were canceled long before we boarded in Washington DC and they did not even bother to tell anyone. We were just stranded in Philly with no way to get home other than to wait on standby for the next flight. In this case the first one was the following morning! Oh, and we were not the only ones. There were over 40 people waiting on standby for a flight to Minneapolis alone. And this was the airline’s plan amazingly enough.
Now one may think… “Wow, it must cost them so much money to put people up in hotels and give them free tickets for the trouble”
This is where you would be wrong. You see, all of this was still considered “Weather Related” and airlines do not have to compensate you in any way whatsoever when it is the fault of weather. Not to mention the fact that I was flying on free tickets from being bumped last year from a flight complicated matters as they were not even obligated to find me a flight on another airline…
We spent Sunday night in the airport, waiting for the 8:00 AM flight. Then, along with the 40 or so others, the 9:45 AM, the 1:30 PM, the final flight at 8:00 PM. All of them were full. No one was leaving from the standby group. We were stuck.
The airline gave me a voucher so that myself and my sons could go sleep in a hotel Monday night so we could return early on Tuesday and go at it again…
We eventually did make it home but, damn, what an experience…
The point of all of this is that life has been taking big chucks out of me lately. Out of my time. Out of my desire. Out of my soul. The burglary, the travel, the workload. It has all gotten the best of me.
I will get out of this mood and get to posting again. I mean, there is a lot of cool stuff going on. Hopefully, in the coming days I will find the heart to say something about it.

Take a look a these sexy action list planning pads from Behance.
MoCo Loco has a quick peek at the Moleskine City Notebook for New York City and mostly likes what it sees. We used the Barcelona model while we were there and found it very useful – especially the maps and being ale to write down addresses for places we wanted to go.
You just have to check out Timbuk2’s new line of Moleskine Notebook Covers as well. Very nice. I have been a fan of their bags for a very long time (10 years). If that is not enough, they have a whole line of office pr0n.
Since my laptop was stolen, and I need to keep as much out “in the cloud” as I can until I purchase a replacement, I have been using Google Reader for my RSS addiction. You know what? This is a very nice web based feed reader. I may actually find myself sticking with it. It has been very nice to have my feeds available to me any place I can access a browser.

The Good News…
Bethany and I have arrived safely back home and had a wonderful honeymoon in Spain. It was more beautiful than I could have ever imagined. A perfect honeymoon. We found people very friendly and, since we stayed in the old parts of the towns, very easy to walk most places. I think I lost about 10 pounds while there because of the amount of walking we did.
The Bad News…
This past weekend, while we were still away, our house was broken into. They kicked in our two inch thick solid wood back door, literally off it’s hinges. We are still enumerating the items taken. Suffice to say that it is totaling in the thousands of dollar range. All of our laptops, iPods, a DVD player, some watches from my collection, about a third of our wine collection and more booze on hand, some cash, gift cards… And that is only about half the list. Even more painful is that Bethany did not have a very recent backup so lots of her work is lost.
Therefore, please bear with the continued delay between posting as we try to recover (and since my main computer was one of the ones taken).

Not much time to type. Trying to fit a lot of internet into a little bit of time. Just wanted to post real quick about how things are going so far. Here are just a few of the highlights…

• Barcelona is a wonderful city and we did not have nearky enough time there. The apartment we found on Craigslist was perfect and the host, Kevin, was gracious and kind. The aprtment itself was very well located and was easy access to all of the main parts of the city. I can not detail all of the things we did here, I will do that when I return. Let me just say that there were all sorts of wonderful moments and surprises. Too many to list.
• Seville is proving to be equally special in its own way. It is a beautiful city. Very old world. Very respecful of its many influences. We saw and amazing flamenco show last night, had tapas in some wonderful little local bars and had a great walking tour today. We hope to get a carriage ride in as well before we head on to Ronda tomorrow.

• Being able to have the Nokia N800 for internet and VoIP access has been a life saver. It has been a breeze connecting from wherever we can. I even was able to do a little ¨wardriving¨¨with it last night when language barriers prevented the night hotel person and I from figuring out I needed to know what the password was. I simply walked around with the N800 and let it scan for networks until I found an open one. I then connected, started up Gizmo Project and was able to call back home.

All in all this has been an amazing honeymoon so far. Even though Bethany is a bit under the weather we are managing to make the most of every minute. I may post again but I will certainly do a few posts when we return. I would like to go into more detail about so much of what we have seen.