The Airlines: Love ‘em or call Greyhound!

I have been waging a one man vendetta against an airline, of which will remain unnamed, due to a morbid fear of being sued, for about 15 months now.

This unnamed airlines, which flies non-stop from Portland to Amsterdam (PDX to AMS) and from the Twin Cities to Portland (MSP to PDX), has been the bane of my existence for longer than I care to admit.

A bit over a year ago, as I was attempting to spend something like $2,300.00 to buy round trip tickets from Portland to Amsterdam, but their on-line system was having problems and couldn’t confirm my flight. They suggested I call to make the reservations. So I did. I called and waited on hold for 30 minutes, only to be informed that I would be charged a surcharge for talking to a live person. I remember it being $25.00 per ticket, but that may be an exaggeration. I was flabbergasted!

Their system doesn’t work, so I have to pay more money… ludicrous. After a number of days of haggling, and many hours on the phone, I finally got the tickets, without the real-live-person surcharge by talking to a supervisor’s supervisor, who could track all my attempts on her computer, and admitted that it seemed odd.

It was a bitter victory, but a victory. (Figuring the hours I spent, on-line and on-phone, it was like $3.50 per hour.)

So, now I am trying to get a ticket from Minneapolis/St. Paul to Portland. I checked Travelocity, and they didn’t have great prices, but the only non-stop flights they listed were through this unnamed airlines. I thought I would check their website and see what I could get. Holy frickin’ Toledo, they got great prices. I swallow my pride and try to buy the ticket.

Well, as stunning as it may seem, I can’t . Seems my legal name is Robert M. Cornelison, and my credit card is R.M. Cornelison. Obviously, I am different people, with the same address. I have to call. Been there, done that.

So today, I went online to Travelocity… I’ll do what I can. There is another airline with non-stop service from Minnesota to Oregon. Hot damn. I jump to their website buy the ticket (for $9.40 more than then unnamed airline) and strut around like I have beaten Goliath. I am so proud. I am a demi-god.

Then I get the ticket confirmation. I am flying the unnamed airlines. Seems Delta and the butt-plugs have merged.

At best, a hollow victory.

Happy Stonewall Day

June 28, 1969

It was a different day. America’s laws concerning homosexuals were on a par with the Soviet Union and its bloc.

Forty years later, we are still struggling for equality.

Gardening with Mac.

I am not a gifted gardener: I don’t have green thumbs. I’m claiming it was a hard winter, as a number of my perennials are still in their dormant state.

But there are some successes;

The red hot pokers are putting on a show like never before.

And the Japanese irises are blooming, even if it isn’t a robust display.

FPO Training.

Once a year I get to go play in the woods for my job. It’s a tradition that started six or seven years ago.

The Forest Service does an annual training of Forest Protection Officers at the Inn. FPOs are sort of entry level law enforcement. The USFS doesn’t have a large number of Law Enforcement Officers, so they are supplemented, to a degree, by the FPOs. FPOs write parking tickets, enforce campground rules: patrol the forest in general. Often they are the first to see real problems.

On Thursday of the weeklong training, they do scenes that attempt to re-enact situations the FPO’s will actually encounter. My friend Sher, who at the time ran the training, invited me to take part in the scenarios. I jumped at the chance to get out of the office and into the woods. (Granted, it is Wyeth Campground, by the train tracks, but there is no carpeting or file cabinets.)

Since then, I have been a dufus out gathering firewood without a permit, twice I’ve been stealing fire camp equipment, I’ve been a kindly drunk who got his truck stuck in a ditch, had a car accident with a Forest Service vehicle, and had a heart attack trying to get my truck out of a ditch. This year I was a snitch… turning in the neighboring campers for stealing fire camp equipment. Trust me, I knew all the tell tale signs.

Then there was the two years when I was a grower at a major pot farm in the forest. But that was for LEO Re-certification. So it doesn’t really count.

It’s fun, but I hope I help the FPO be safe. As Sher told me once, the FPOs are damn near the only people in the forest without guns.

I do get gratifications by the many times people say “Thank you” to me.

This from 2004... I think I was stealing fire camp equipment, and obviously setting the stage for my future drunken scenes!

June 22, 1969

Many of us remember it with a bit of a chuckle. Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River caught on fire. What I didn’t realize is that it wasn’t the first time that the river through downtown Cleveland burst into flames. Apparently the first eight, nine or ten times
(depending on your source), no one thought it odd.

As scary as it is to say, the Cuyahoga is not the only river in America to burn. The Providence River, in central Providence, Rhode Island has also been known to flame up. Apparently, they intentionally burned it from time to time, just to “clean it up”.

Add to that the North, Chicago, Buffalo, Fallsaway, and Passaic Rivers and you get a pretty grim picture of the United States’ history of abusing its rivers.

Let’s all give us a hand for doing a little better these days!

Summer is here!!! Summer is here!!!.

Just in time for Father's Day, the northern hemisphere greets summer!

Define "Truth in Advertising"

As I was driving home from work today, listening to the advertisements on the radio station, I was struck by the totally unbelievable claims.(I know, old school. I should have been madly texting on my I-pod while getting down to rappy-type-music on my boysenberry!)

Are there people who really are desperate enough to try this crap?

First, there was the “natural supplement” that would take 15 to 20 pounds of troublesome fat off your belly in two weeks, without you having to starve yourself or do any tiring exercises. Wow, this sounds so totally healthy! (Has anyone checked to see if meth does the same thing?) And, to sweeten the deal, they would send you a month’s supply “FREE OF CHARGE!!!” Okay, maybe I’m cynical, but if it is a natural supplement and does what they claim, why do they have to give it away? And if it’s suppose to work in two weeks, why do the send you a month’s supply? Is there a detail I missed?

Then there was the credit counselor, who will get you debt free in 2 years, no matter how close you are to bankruptcy, using just the money you earn now. Yes, pay off your cars, your 30-year mortgage, your student loans and your thousands of dollars worth of credit card bills. In two years! I thought about doing the math, but I was afraid it would destroy the magic for me. The only thing I could think of was that the counselor would instruct you to open a warehouse to hold white children being inducted into the lucrative sex-slave industry. You really wouldn't "earn" any more money.

But, for the coup de grâce, there was the miracle cream that took 20 years off your face in three days. This one, of course was targeted at the female audience. Like there aren’t a whole bunch of men who would use this cream, if it worked, with eagerness and glee? We’d just be macho and buy it by the truckload. With that said, the whole idea of putting something astringent enough to accomplish that small feat, on my tender skin, scares the bejesuses out of me. And, not to be outdone by the “natural supplement”, the miracle cream was giving a free month’s supply also! It works in 3 days… why a month? Is it opiate based?

Maybe I’ll just read the newspaper as I drive home from work!

Once a Pirate, always a Pirate.

I borrowed that from the Oregonian newspaper.

Cascade Locks School, in Cascade Locks, Oregon, graduated seven seniors this year. The K-12 school has 130 students, so there are no bigger graduating classes coming. Actually, there are no more graduating classes coming. Due to budget constraints, declining enrollment and all those other moribund statistics, the Hood River County School District has opted to close Cascade Locks High School and send the students to Hood River Valley High School. (Cascade Locks will remain as a K-8 school.)

But for a small town, reeling from high unemployment, losing its high school is something of a death knell. I don’t mean to insinuate that the Locks (as we often refer to Cascade Locks) is going away as a town, but part of its identity is dying. The last home basketball game has been played. I don't know if the Pirates won the game or lost, but the town lost the team.

To Ashlea, Leah, Ashleyanne, Montgumry, Lety, Lydia and Adam: carry your honor high. A small town is depending on you.

Ghosts of Horse Shows Past.

Ginny, Kathleen, myself, Carol, Mary and Linda

Horasio and Ish

Lucinda

Kathleen and Ginny

Maureen (wish I had a better picture.)

Nancy

The Show
For me, it has always been the people.

"Don't Even Bother Checking Your EMail!"

"You never get anything important, anyway. Just pet me!!! Pet me!!! Pet me!!!"

(There is a keyboard somewhere under that mass of fur.)

There is little to mourn at the start of summer.

But the end of the peony bloom is one.

Perhaps, I will never get it right.

Okay, I know. The title of the play is "A Midsummer Night's Dream".

Let's just pretend there was no play, and all will be well with the world!

At this rate, I could learn to hate Shakespeare!

Spike loves his new carpet!

Richard bought a new rug for the house, (actually he bought it for the set of his play and the house inherited it). But it is a good rug. A tasteful blend of colors reminisent of black cat and St. Bernard. An important attribute!

Another View

Anchorage is all abuzz about the assembly’s meeting tonight where they will discuss their sexual orientation amendment.

Let me put this real bluntly. I am gay. All four people who directly report to me, the only people who I have the authority to terminate their employment, are breeders (a kinda technical term, only sorta applicable). Do I have the right to fire them because they are in “opposite marriages”? (Thanks, Miss California, you have successfully made it sound totally disgusting.)

I don’t, in Hood River County. God, but in Anchorage. They would be gone so fast your head would spin! (It’s not true. Kathleen, Susan, Jan, Raquel: I love working with you!)

I remember many years ago. I think it was 1979. Dade County, Florida, led by America’s sweetie, Anita Bryant, overturned a gay rights ordinance by popular vote. I told my mother that I hoped there was some gay man or lesbian in Miami, wealthy enough to own an apartment building, who evicted all their straight tenants, because it was legal.

Mom said, “No you don’t. It wouldn’t be right.”

I am so lucky to have had such a wise woman as my mother.

I'm Slipping

Two posts ago... the title was suppose to be "A Midsummer's Night Dream". It was suppose to tell you all the Richard did a Shakespeare play. Everyone was expected to understand the underlying meaning. But I screwed up.

No one understood anything. "A Midnight Summer's Dream".

Must have been an acid flashback.

If only I were so lucky!

For the good of the order

Sometimes you are forced to do activities that, if it weren't for your poor career choices, you would never do.

Today, it was whitewater rafting. The things I do for my job! I had forgotten how much fun it is. I live in the middle of some pretty primo rivers, and hadn’t been in some 7 or 8 years! Bad Mac! Bad Mac!

The water is 42 degrees. When it pours over you, it takes your breath away. Quite literally!

Okay, I'm no expert, but isn't the guide actually suppose to be in the boat with you?

A Midnight Summer’s Dream.

Richard’s play closed last night and I went to see it, for the second time. The problem with going to see Richard’s plays at CGCC is that they are performed in The Dalles, almost an hour’s drive away. So I ride in with Richard, but he has to be there two and a half hours before the opening curtain. So what does one do in The Dalles for 2.5 hours to entertain oneself?

I have no idea.

I tried shopping. I bought a pair of pants, two belts, some vitamins and a rug. Those of you, who know me, know that I am the consummate shopper. I can spend, literally seconds making some of the poorest judgment moves imaginable when I am in a store. Especially if I am alone. I buy belts that are too small, an entry rug that can’t get wet and can only be cleaned professionally and vitamin E instead of C. And I still had one hour and forty-five minutes to kill.

So you get a pictorial of the campus of Columbia Gorge Community College:


View to the northwest from the front lawn. CGCC is high on a hill above downtown The Dalles.

This is the front lawn with Buildings 1 and 2. CGCC uses amazingly original names for their buildings.
The Amphitheater..

Just say NO!

And I hear Anchorage is trying to pass an ordinance prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation.

All I can say is “don’t do it, you Anchoragians" (or Anchoragites, or whatever…) Hood River County passed a gay rights ordinance last year, and it has been hell ever since.

I’m sure you’ve all heard about the horrendous earthquakes we have had this year. And the tornadoes and hurricanes; pestilence and plague. We are waist deep in grasshoppers! It has been horrific. We are teetering on the edge of total disaster.

So, Anchorage-type-people, save yourself from total distruction. Make sure queers have no rights in your city!

Fire! Fire!

It was really a pretty minor fire. The lobby building of the Inn filled with smoke, and we all evacuated to the parking lot. None of you outside of the Hood River-White Salmon metropolitan area will hear about it on your local news. And trust me the national news stations have much more interesting things to report. No one was hurt. There was little (if any) structural damage.

But for every hotelier, particularly those of us who started out our career as night auditors, spending many of our shifts as virtually the only employee of the hotel on property, just the idea of a fire is the nightmare of your existence. You dream of running the halls, screaming “FIRE! FIRE!”, like anyone could hear your shouts over the obnoxiously loud alarms.

I did nothing special; nothing to write home about. But I am exhausted. My body hurts. It is amazing what stress can do to a late-middle-aged body!

Number 6

Joining the great states of Massachusetts, Vermont, Maine, Connecticut and Iowa!

And one more thing!

Having a pet doesn't make you live longer. It's just that the days drag on and on, creating an illusion of a longer life.

Some tidbits.

Richard just got his edition of the AARP magazine. Opie is on the cover. Something is so terribly wrong with that. (They keep sending membership information to Dad at my address. You’d think they would read the obituaries to avoid these costly errors! I mean really, how many R.M. Cornelison’s can there be!)

It’s finally hitting me that we aren’t doing a horse show this year. My last 17 Father’s Days spent slinging hash; what will I do this year?

Dick Cheney has come out in support of gay marriage. Do I need to rethink my stance? No, it is sincerely good to see a man of such a divergent political stand from mine love his daughter enough to question the all encompassing message of the right. Thank you, Mr. Cheney. We don’t see eye-to-eye on much, but I commend you for your love of your child.

370,000 people died of AIDS in South Africa in 2008. I can’t be the only person in America who cries when s/he hears that statistic.

Ain’t it kind of funny that Governor Pawlenty of Minnesota has announced he won’t run for another term? Judging by the state’s standard of electing senators, he really shouldn’t have to announce his intentions about running for governor in 2012 until mid 2014.

To all three of you who read my blog with some minor regularity: Thank You. I blog for me, but I’m glad you came along for the ride!

Day 365

To celebrate the last day of my first year of blogging (I know most of you think it feels like much longer), I have decided to post various and sundry uniteresting photographs.


Auntie Bea's irises are putting on a spectacular show this year!


Jane, your peony party may be pre-empted by mine!


Spike in his happy spot, lurking above the toilet!