Several Memories

The last few days have unlocked a flood of memories. Tuesday I flew up to Butte for the holiday. As I was packing I had several memories of various trips that Jennifer and I had taken and some of the mishaps we had. Like the time we were going on our first cruise and had left our passports at the house and did not realize it until we got to the airport. Thank God for our friends the Searle’s for bailing us out on that one. Or the time we got stranded in Minneapolis and I left our tickets on top of a pay phone and did not realize it until we were 100 miles away and rushed back to the airport to find the tickets still sitting on top of the phone. There were several others that popped into my head as I was putting things in my bag. Usually Jennifer did the packing ( she was better at it than me), so I still am getting used to doing it.

My trip was uneventful, but a little frustrating. There was a young lady flying with two young kids. All I can say is that these kids should be on Santa’s naughty list. They were little shits. They were probably in the 4-7 age bracket. But on the flight from Salt Lake to Butte they were little terrors. For the life of me I questioned why the Mom put them side by side and sat across the isle from them. The little boy was the oldest and he kept unbuckling his seat belt, which proceeded the little sister to do the same. At one point the little sister proceeded to have a full scale meltdown screaming at the top of her lungs for about 3 minutes that seemed like 3 years. Meanwhile Mom just yells their names. Instead of kicking their little butts into shape. Anyway, I was one happy camper once that flight was over.

It was pretty windy in Butte when I got here, but the heavy stuff was not here yet. It showed up Wednesday. About 8:30 Wednesday morning the power went out. Not totally unexpected, but what was unexpected was how long it went out for. We did not get power back until 12:30 ish on Thursday. The one fortunate thing about this was that Montana has been having a very unusually warm winter so far. There is just a trace of snow (although we are getting some snow showers tonight). This outage could have been much worse than it was. Of course this brought back memories of Jennifer and my experience in San Antonio when we did not have water for 5 days.

If I were to have to choose about which of the two I would go without it would be water. Having no electricity is a pain and much more challenging. At least with electricity you can do things. Anyway, I prefer not to have to make the choice.

Has already made the holiday memorable. Well enough for today.