and finally

the last three comments

The flights were, well, flights. Our first flight was short and then we got on a plane from Denver to Fort Lauderdale. The guy sitting next to the window, next to me, was, from the start, one of those chatty guys. We hadn't even clicked our seatbelts before he knew we were from Salt Lake, were going to the Bahamas, and numerous other things. Before we left the ground, I was having those thoughts about wishing he would just shut up (or something like that). After a couple of minutes, Jack got out his credit card and charged the $5 it cost to watch tv. with commercials. That didn't stop chattyman. He continued for another half an hour until I leaned towards Jack and said I didn't think I could stay in my seat any longer. maybe not even on the plane. Jack did the reasonable thing. He suggested that I get out my credit card and put on my headphones. Which I did. Even that didn't stop chattyman. He started out telling us about his work (making custom staircases for wealthy clients), progressed to weather in Colorado, and eventually landed on politics. By this time, Jack was engrossed in Bill O'Reilly's tv show, which he used to watch all of the time, but gave up on a while back, but hey, it was his vacation too, right? Anyway, I think that's what got chattyguy thinking we all agreed about politics. And that's when I did the only reasonable thing I could think of. I changed the channel until I found Keith Olbermann on MSNBC, obviously the antithesis of O'Reilly. And I watched as intently as I could, nodding my head and saying, "Absolutely, Keith, Right on". That finally shut him up. Smart me.

About that van ride back from Pleasure Island. We didn't have the taxi van to ourselves. The driver insisted he needed to fill up the van, so he started recruiting riders, including a family that I'm guessing was from oh, let's say, New Jersey. The most talkative guy had to slide across the seat to sit near me and that was his first complaint. Not that he had to sit by me, just that he had to slide across a seat that was wet and sandy. Score one for me. For the approximately five minutes we waited for the van to fill up, this guy loudly carried on--how long do we have to wait, I'm not waiting any longer, what the heck is taking so long, blah, blah, blah. Finally the driver found two more lucky riders and we started back towards Nausau. I cannot even begin to explain how much I would have paid to be able to fart on command. I wouldn't have cared if the farts were loud noisy farts. Silent might have been better. But anything would have been good. Anything to give him something else to moan about. I saw him later on our ship, walking around with one of those nextel walkie-talkie things. I feel fairly certain that the reason he had that was because the rest of his group wanted to be able to stay as far away from him as possible and while he might have thought the nextel things were a great way to stay in touch, I think they were really a way to keep lots of space around him. Crazy whining dog.

Finally, for some reason, I had this crazy idea that while on the cruise, eating all kinds of white flour rolls, divine desserts, and whole eggs with sausage, that as long as we walked around a lot and took the stairs most of the time, that I would continue to lose weight. In fact, several times I commented on my size and shape to Jack. I want to thank him publicly, here and now, for never, not once on the cruise or at any time on this vacation responding to my question, "Do you think I'm losing weight?" by saying, "Are you huggin' high?"

He's a good man to travel with.