Sunset Dreams

Have you ever flown in an airplane at sunset before?

I had the unique opportunity to take a flight out of San Diego at around 5:30 pm a couple of weeks ago.

It was raining on the ground - one of those few days a year that San Diego actually gets precipitation.

The sky looked dreary and bleak all day long, and by the time I was in the plane waiting for takeoff I, too, was in a pretty dreary and bleak mood.

I was leaving home again on another trip, this time over a week long. I was sad to leave my husband

and my dog

and my home

behind.

The plane took off;

I had my usual moment of disorientation as the plane quickly climbed higher in the sky;

and then all of a sudden......

P O O F

we popped out of the clouds like a jack-in-the-box and I found myself surrounded by this:

Simply amazing

Gobble gobble

A friend pointed out that my blog doesn't have anything about Thanksgiving in it. Correct! That's because I didn't do anything with anybody. Alberto went to Culiacan to see his family, so it was just Dudley and me. I spent the holiday in deep meditation. Ok, I am not that deep but I did use it as a time to devote to learning how to write a business plan.

This is no small feat.

Definitely more than 4 days worth of time, I barely scraped the surface of what I need to get together.

When I took breaks, I watched movies and got caught up on Heroes. Dudley and I went for walks and worked in the yard. I got the house all festooned with Christmas cheer.

I didn't have one bit of turkey and I couldn't be happier about it!

Another post will come in a little while, with some lovely aerial photos from the last flight I took....

Waco fun

I'm in Waco for a few days, attending client meetings. Not much to do in this town, but my hotel room does have a jacuzzi and lots of cable channels. So I spent last night drinking beer, hanging out in my jacuzzi tub and watching submarine movies on AMC....

A funfilled Saturday

Yesterday Alberto decided at the last minute to not go to work, giving us a free Saturday together.

With me flying back to Texas tonight, we decided to make the most out of the day and do some fun stuff!








Wild Animal Park

After 5+ years of living here, I finally got to go to the Wild Animal Park! We didn't see all of it, but I didn't really want to anyway...we are planning on coming back with Jonathan and his family. Instead of rushing to see it all, we picked a circuitous route around the south end of the park so we could see the lions.

We had a great time! We saw a 'hot air balloon', which gives people a 10 minute or so ride up in the air to take in the landscape:
























We saw an Eland along the way, and then we got to see the lions.

They were lazing in the afternoon sun, completely ignoring us. The only time they picked up their heads was to listen to a plane as it passed overhead.





Then we went to go see the Elephant show.

We learned that there are 5 Asian Elephants and 11 African elephants at the Wild Animal Park.


We also learned that elephants have over 100,000 muscles in their trunks. The elephants demonstrated this by catching sticks, one after the other, as they were being tossed up by the handler. One elephant had 5 sticks in her trunk by the time they were done!



The elephants were really beautiful and gentle.


The handlers showed us how they have to be trained to do lots of things so that the handlers can take care of them, like trust to raise their feet up behind them so that handlers can check for abcesses and also to crouch down so that the handlers can get a better look at them during health checkups.





After the elephants, we made our way back to the front, where we saw lots of birds hanging out in the waterways that run through the park, and then stopped to see some cute meerkats.



I love those little guys!But they moved so fast that I couldn't get a very clear shot of them!Instead, they came out looking like the Tazmanian Devil! :D














All in all, we had a great time, but that was only half of our fun day!

Poker Night


That night, we had dinner and poker night for a small group of our friends.

I invited Tan and a friend and Alberto invited Angel and his girlfriend Dawn.


I always get nervous when you mix groups and I wasn't sure if it all turn out well. But we had a great time and everyone enjoyed playing poker and drinking until almost 2 am!








At the end of the night, Jerry won the most money, and Dawn and Angel ended up on the losing end.



We had a lot of fun teaching Dawn how to play and I (who lost all my money in record time!) ended up being the designated dealer most of the night.



I hope we get to hang with this group again soon.

A word from Obama

Have you decided on who you want for President yet? I haven't either, but I wanted to share something interesting with you that surprised me a bit.

A year ago, when Barack Obama was just coming onto the political landscape, I wrote him a letter saying that he should run for President (I was very interested in infusing some new blood into the old game) and that he should make the recovery of the Gulf Coast one of his top issues.

I flattered myself by thinking that I might get a response back, but never expected it to happen. Sure enough, after many months went by I almost forgot that I'd even written.

Until I got this:

Your eyes do not decieve you, it is a response from Barack Obama that I got about a month ago. Yes, that is his handwritten signature on the bottom of the letter!

As indicated, he enclosed literature on what his position on the Gulf Coast is.

I was really affected by receiving this letter - partly because I never thought it would happen, but more because I could tell it wasn't just a form letter that one of his staff autoprinted and mailed.

I can see that his team is actually reading and responding to the letters he's receiving, and I can see that he played a personal role in writing the letter because of the content of the first paragraph.

Can Obama really be a man of the people? I wasn't too impressed with him when I saw him at the L.A. rally in February, but I think I owe it to him to have another look...

A bird's eye view...

I'm back in San Diego and emerging from the pile of stuff I had to catch up on from being gone for a week.

While I was gathering up my bags for the trip, it occurred to me that I'd have a chance to see what the rest of the city looked like as we drove to the airport, as also to see what the wildfires looked like from the air! So I packed my camera in my stuff and got ready as we took off to see some stuff...

On the Road

Here are a few shots from the road. There was pretty much a lot of two things - smoke and traffic:

sorry it's fuzzy - but you can see the thick haze everywhere and the sea of cars.

The approach to Carmel Valley...this is an interesting vista of how the smoke is just kind of a layer over everything in the city.

If you live in a city with smog this might not look strange to you. But here, the only time we don't have a crystal clear view of the landscape is when there is fog that rolls in from the ocean in the morning. This is definitely not that!

In the Air

At the airport, everything was empty. Eerily empty. I guess a lot of people were doing the same thing I did, cancelling travel plans until they knew better how to plan their next move. After making it through the security gate in record time and waiting at the terminal almost an hour, I finally boarded the plane, eagerly anticipating what I was going to see.

What I ended up seeing was a lot more smoke. Smoke obscured almost everything, so most of my pictures weren't that great. As we headed east and away from the ocean though, things changed a bit. I started to see more dinstinction between where the smoke was and where it wasn't, and an ominous layer of thick black that was already starting to settle over the area....

A coastline picture through the smoke

A layer of black over the landscape

Left:

You can see us flying over the smoke in the air, and approaching an area where you can see beyond the haze

Below:

This picture was really telling - you can see the plumes of smoke still blowing in a very westerly direction, back toward the direction from where we came.

Last photo: Blackened Earth