Spring will be here soon, Spring will be here soon, Spring will be here soon...

Part of back yard - early May - forget what year.

After going through a hail storm today that I thought was going to bash in my front window for sure with its fierceness and having endured a seemingly endless series of rolling thunderstorms with the same crappy sub-normal temperatures for the past 3 days, I am really looking forward to Las Vegas in a few weeks!

Not to mention - shortly after our investment club meeting split up (about 10 minutes before the hail storm hit) - and with lightning all about and high winds thrashing my trees this way and that, the metal tent hooks that hold the trellis (see photo) anchored in the ground worked lose from the rain-saturated earth and it was in danger of blowing away.  I made a mad dash outdoors, righted the structure (it is relatively light because it is made out of vinyl plastic) and then frantically searched the ground for the pegs - found them and fortunately was able to pound them back in place with my shoed foot as I did not stop to take a hammer outdoors with me!  The ground was that wet.  So far, so good, the trellis has held and I hope the worst of the weather is over, but it doesn't look like it.  Sigh.

Guess what - this is the first time I booked a flight to LV on Southwest Airlines (they had the best fare the day I was shopping for fares) and what is in the headlines but that a Southwest Airlines flight had to make an emergency landing because a hole - yes, a hole, that was FIVE FRIGGING FEET LONG AND ONE FRIGGING FOOT WIDE - where do they get off calling this a "hole" - suddenly appeared in one side of the 737 as it was flying at 36,000 feet!


"Hole" in the Southwest jet provided by passenger Christine
Ziegler , shows an apparent [APPARENT?] hole in the cabin
on a Southwest Airlines  aircraft Friday, April 1, 2011
in Yuma, Ariz. Authorities say the flight from Phoenix to
Sacramento, Calif., was diverted to Yuma due to
rapid decompression in the plane.

 Okay, now all of you who are Twilight Zone graduates remember the pre-Captain Kirk episode of the Zone where William Shatner was the scared-to-death-to-fly passenger sitting in a window seat and he sees this brown furred creature dancing about on the wing of the jet who rips up the metal like it was nothing and then starts tampering with the electrical wires!  HORRORS!  I do believe that episode was called something like Terror at 36,000 Feet!

Well, except (maybe) for the dancing monster on the wings, that's exactly what happened at 36,000 feet on this flight a few days ago - TERROR.  Can you imagine sudden decompression at 36,000 feet and there - PLOP - is that oxygen mask thingy right in front of your horrified eyes -- and what the hell do you do with it, exactly, because no one bothers (except me) to listen to the flight attendants' schpiel about flight safety anymore...

I haven't read any reports about anyone not wearing their seatbelts being sucked through that "hole" - HOLE? EXCUSE ME - HOLE?  But these days I don't trust the press to come up with what actually happened anymore and I'll bet the government has tamped down more tightly on what REALLY happened to the passengers on that flight than on the fake moon landings.  Well, I don't believe the moon landings were fake but on the other hand - there are a hell of a lot of people who do and you know what, with the things I've seen and heard over the past few years, who the hell really knows anything anymore, unless you're right there front and center.  And those people aren't talking, evidently.

Which seems rather odd, doesn't it? 

Okay, so I'll be headed to Las Vegas on a Southwest flight.  I am putting my affairs in order...