Dining Room Christmas Decorations

Thanks for all the cards, photos and newsletters. Our dining room mantel is festooned with them and, from his nearby vantage point atop the china cabinet, our woodland Santa figure gazes over at them approvingly.

What WE Want For Christmas

It would be a tight fit under the Christmas tree, but we still are hopeful! This is the house we have been trying to buy for the last six weeks. It is a brick Italian Villa with big rooms, tall ceilings and a great curvy stairway, and it sits on a hill on the other side of Lebanon.

The house had been on the market at a high price for four years but the owners had to give it up to their bank in September. The bank cut the price a lot (though still a big stretch for us) so we put in a bid and, lo and behold, got a purchase contract. There are problems to work through (title, legal description, expiring Fannie Mae incentives, etc) so it isn't a done deal but we are really, really, trying!

Our Thanksgiving

Here is our little group about to devour Thanksgiving dinner - except for Annie, who stood up from the table to take the picture. We had a very thankful day!

Our Pecans

We have a curiosity at the Tower House - a pecan tree. Last year it produced no nuts but this year it is loaded. I was turning the vegetable garden today and saw the pecans were popping out of their skins like the ones in this picture. In two hours I picked and dehusked 525 nuts, a total of seven pounds (still in the shells). Now my fingertips are black - I wonder how long it will take for that to wear off. But it was worth it, because now Lee Ann is going to make a pecan pie for Thanksgiving.

Wikipedia indicates that pecan trees are native to a large part of the south and as far northeast as Louisville Kentucky - and then there is a tiny dot of range up in Ohio, right where we are. Lucky us!

Air Force Museum

Annie is on her way back to Roanoke today after spending a week home on fall break. Unfortunately I was traveling for most of that week, but we did get to spend time on Monday visiting the Air Force Museum in Dayton. They sure have a lot of planes there!

Roanoke Weekend

On Friday morning, Lee Ann and Danny and I piled into the car and drove to Roanoke for the Family Weekend at the college. We had beautiful weather to drive in, and enjoyed the first tinge of fall colors on the forested hills of Kentucky and West Virginia. And then we were there with Annie.

Family Weekend is a series of organized events and activities designed (I think) to reassure parents that real, college-like things are happening on campus and that their children are in good hands. We went to a few of the programmed activities, including a historical walking tour of the town of Salem and a fun Honors College slide show of the wilderness retreat Annie and the others participated in a few weeks ago. We also just spent time with Annie, whose fondest wish after a month of dorm food was to get off campus and eat in restaurants. We were happy to oblige, since after a month of empty nestedness our fondest wish was to sit and talk to our kid, and restuarants are pretty good for that.

We stayed over in a pet-friendly Howard Johnson's and left Roanoke at noon on Saturday, arriving home at about dark. Now it is Sunday morning and Lee Ann is packing for five days in Lexington to work the Tack Trunk booth at the World Equestrian Games. It's all or nothing with this family - a nice weekend together, and then we scatter to the four winds.

Houston Jinx

It seems I can't just fly to Houston and back on business without some travel adventure finding its way, unbidden, into the works.

My last visit was in June. I flew in Monday, spent all week giving "Eye on Safety" training sessions (something we cooked up internally to teach behavioral concepts) to our hourly Texas employees, and had a Friday morning flight home. Everything went fine until Friday, when the first two Cincinnati flights of the day were cancelled and the rest filled up before I could rebook. I had been boarded and returned to the terminal twice due to mechanical problems with our plane, with a total of about three hours sitting on the tarmac before the flight finally was cancelled, while others gobbled up available seats on later flights. The best I could get at that point was a Saturday morning flight home, and I spent the night Friday in the airport hotel.

This week I am traveling to Houston again for the supervisor part of the training. My morning flight from Cincinnati proceeded on time until we got close to Houston, at which point our pilot was instructed to circle while controllers tried to get a stack of planes on the ground through the thunderstorms spawned by tropical storm Hermine. Eventually we had to divert to Alexandria, LA for a quick fuel stop, we were told. But as soon as we were on the ground, the pilot announced that Houston was holding aircraft due to the weather and so we deplaned. We proceeded to spend 2 1/2 hours at the tiny terminal there, where our planeload of Delta passengers overwhelmed the little snack bar like hyenas on a wildebeest. A fish sandwich and fries were a 45 minute wait - but hey, at that point we were just killing time.

I had honestly never heard of Alexandria, and I was traveling with my boss Terry, who is a Louisiana native but had never been there. The military trained bomber crews there during WWII but it was turned over for civilian use years ago and now handles just a few commuter flights a day - plus the occasional plane diverted from New Orleans or Houston, like us. The terminal is brick and the control tower is built right on top of it, not separate like at most airports (see picture). It's a perfectly nice terminal unless you are being held there against your will.

Eventually we were called for reboarding and packed back onto our Canadair jet. Once we were onboard, the captain announced that we would be underway as soon as we got fuel. What? They hadn't had time to do that yet? So a fuel truck came out and, while we waited for that, we received another hold from Houston and spent 45 minutes more sitting on the runway before taking off. And instead of the 30-minute Alexandria-Houston leg the attendants promised, we flew a roundabout course well to the south (to avoid the storms, I'm sure) that took an hour.

So my nifty two hour direct flight ended up taking eight hours. I'm not complaining - I'm always glad when the airlines and air traffic control folks keep our plane from flying to our doom. But what is it with me and Houston?