Namo amitabha Buddhaya, y'all.
This here's a religious establishment. Act respectable.

Monday, September 6, 2010

Talk Thursday (the following Monday): Priority Mail

Interesting topic for a Talk Thursday. More so in that I spent much of the last several days wishing it were possible to mail human beings from one place to another. Here's the thing - I like going places, but I hate going places. That is, I hate the physical packing of a suitcase, finding a neighbor to watch after the cats, finding the cats so they can be watched over by the neighbor (with apologies to Douglas Adams), the hauling of me, Joan, the suitcase, and assorted accoutrements to the airport, the stuffing myself into an airplane seat, the stuffing Joan in next to me, the dirty looks from whoever has the misfortune of being stuffed in next to us (this last lady actually got up & moved; hey, if it's not a full flight and she'd rather sit next to a whiny four-year-old with a cold than me, well, God be with her) and then the doing it all in reverse on the other end. It would be much easier if we could just hop into an envelope, stick a stamp on our butts and emerge instantaneously on the other end. I keep wishing somebody would invent transporters, but particle physics keeps telling me that while it's technically possible, what it would actually be is not transportation but duplication. And the last thing we need is another one of me running around.

All that said, however, we spent an interesting weekend in Salt Lake City with my folks. Interesting because my folks are always interesting. For one thing, they're nomadic. They just happened to be in Salt Lake City this particular weekend. They have a house there and another one in Arizona but they're most often found at none of the above; Glacier National Park, Boise, North Dakota, Germany on one occasion, California, Las Vegas and various points between. But, this weekend they were in Salt Lake City. My sister and her husband, who also tend toward the nomadic, were there too, and that was pretty cool. We're not very often all in one place.

Salt Lake is the city of my young childhood, and it's changed quite a bit. For one thing, they have Starbucks now. For another thing, they have a baseball team, even if it is minor league. So we took in a game. The Bees vs. the Reno Aces, victory to the Aces. Oh well. I didn't get my baseball fix this past Fourth of July and we got to ride the train there, so it was all pretty cool. Besides, minor league baseball is fun. The players aren't as polished, so they make more mistakes and the games are a lot more unpredictable.

We also saw a play, Saturday's Voyeur. If you're anywhere near SLC and you speak Utah politics, you will probably want to see it. I didn't catch a lot of the in-jokes, but since many of them were national news, I picked up on the rest. It's a weird place, SLC. Even weirder than Texas. No, really. I am not making this up.

Major high point: Driving up Big Cottonwood Canyon to the Silver Fork Lodge to have the world's best sourdough flapjacks. Major disappointment: Not getting to see JulieAnne because she was busy with family stuff. Oh well. Maybe next time.

And then it was time to repack the suitcase, stick another stamp on myself and mail myself home again, home again. And here we are. The cats are fine and even still speaking to us. Will wonders never cease.

Still, I'd kill for a transporter. Beam me up, Scotty!

2 comments:

Cele said...

I use to love the thought of trans-teleporation until I read a Dean R. Koontz novel where the guy kept coming back from this one place with Rubies inbedded in his skin. Now as a kid I always thought having a gem on my brow would be pretty kewl. But not really much in my adult life.

Thank heavens I love to fly.

Jen said...

One thing I can say about flying: I have trained myself to fall asleep the second the plane leaves the ground and not wake up until it touches down. I don't know how I do it, but I do it. It makes life SO much easier. Course, I never get the little bag of nuts.