He Knew He Was Right

The large amount of travel I've done for work means I have a decent amount of travel reward miles to use. I cashed some of these in to cobble together a long weekend in Florida. Now, the thing with reward programs is that there are restrictions on when you can fly, unless you want to cash in everything all at once. My plan was to make it from NY to Tampa Bay this past Saturday and get to the Yanks-Rays 3:10 game. It's something like a three-hour flight without connections. And, there are billions of direct NY-FLA flights everyday...unless you're using points. I ended up on an 8:00 flight that connected in DC. In a way, I am glad it did. The connection was brief, but it allowed me to witness some of this scene: A flight with 183 World War II vets landed in DC to be taken to the WW II Memorial. They were given a much-deserved heroes welcome, which included a decent-sized band playing music from their era, as they got off the plane. I immediately uploaded this picture ...

Here’s one other story I previously told on Facebook that strikes me as kind of currently relevant, owing to a label I used in the photography entry from two days ago and the snowball assault mentioned yesterday. In this story, there are no snowballs being thrown, but there is an attack of a totally different kind. Back in 2004, while still living on LI, I was in a pretty good running routine, and often ran along the shore at Jones Beach. In early September, I peaked, and ran from Field 6 to the West End jetty and back (about 8 miles round trip). Feeling good--and hungry--I decided to reward myself with a hot dog and soda in the concession stand. With the dog in my left hand and the soda in my right, I headed outside. Suddenly, I felt a solid smack on the back of my left shoulder and then two lighter hits, all of which caused me to raise the arm in an almost defensive motion as I whirled around to see who it was. In an instant, the hot dog was knocked away by the seagull that had been...