I'm hating United Airlines right now...

Right now I am really ticked off at not being able to fly Delta to Aberdeen, instead of United. after 900,000+ miles with Delta, this is my first real trip with United, and I find myself right now stuck at the Heathrow for 5 more hours. Really got hosed from the get-go by United. This is after a four hour delay in CHicago that caused us to lose our Heathrow connection to Aberdeen.

At my connection in Chicago, just 50 minutes before boarding, our flight disappeared from the board. After 45 minutes in line to get some clarification, I get told that our flight was delayed due to weather issues, and that our flight was still circling and waiting to land, and wouldn't land for 3 more hours. Right. No transatlantic flight has enough fuel to circle an airport for three hours after an 8 hour flight. The fact that it was a cloudless sky did not help her case either. Obviously we were lied to because any major delay due to mechanical error would make the airline have to cough up food vouchers and other renumerations. Weather, however, gets them in the clear.

We actually got the full story inadvertently a couple hours later from a different crew, who told us that our fight was on-time, but United made the decision to give our plane to the Munich route because the Munich plane was having mechanical problems with their hydraulics. Guess who got the crap Munich plane 5 hours later? I don't so much mind that United made the decision to divert our plane to another route (probably had fewer missed connections for the Munich flight), I'm just ticked they looked in my face and told me it was "the weather".

Then after landing at Heathrow, the gate agent told us to head straight to Terminal 1 to the United desk, where our updated tickets to Aberdeen were waiting for us. We get there, and find out we should have been sent to Terminal 5, a good 45 minutes away. Another missed flight. Another 5 hour layover.

Instead of getting into Aberdeen at 10 AM with a full day to check things out, I'm lucky to get in by 8 tonight.

Joys of flying...

Octobah Happenings....

Holy procrastination Batman! Has it really been a month since I last looked at me blog? Yep. Apparently so! It dawned on me that I hadn't written in a while, when I got an email from a dear friend who said "hey, you haven't written in a while"...

My days had fallen into a pretty good semblance of normality recently--you know--spend all day at the office, then come home, ask the kids about their day, help with homework, put them to bed, then call Comcast and wait on hold for an hour to complain about the spotty internet service due to the faulty modem they installed last Friday. You know, normal stuff.

I kid. I have also been watching The Office, walking the dogs, finishing up the classroom portion of my job training, and getting around to baptizing Ashton. Yep. The last of the four. It was AWESOME.


Hw was baptized last Saturday, a delay of two weeks from his birthday thanks to conference. Little kids tend to hate conference anyway, so this year he was doubly irritated at having to sit on the living room floor on the 4th. Kind of unsettling to get glowering looks from an eight year old while conference is on, along with complaints like "I SHOULD BE GETTING BAPTIZED TODAY!!"

By last Saturday it was all good. A special day.



We suffered a mini-tragedy two days ago. By we I mean Ashton and by tragedy I mean awesome opportunity for dad to say "I told you so".

Ashton got a scooter for his birthday--
(oh yeah--another event we managed to skip on the blog) on Sep 29th, and I spent the first week of said scooter's life explaining to Ashton that if he kept leaving in the driveway, it was bound to be run over. And in Sienna v. RazorScooter, the good money is on the Sienna. LO and behold, CRUNCH. Yesterday Agi mangled it after a quick run to the store.

Softee that I am, after my obligatory "I told you so's" and "gee what a wonderful teaching lesson this is", I decided to try and fix his scooter. Thankfully, only the stem was mangled, so I thought I could pound it back into an upright position with a mallet. Nope. Made it worse. Then I managed to at least get it taken apart, followed by a trip to Wal-mart to find a cheapie 20 dollar scooter from which I could use the stem and handlebars to replace the mangled pieces.

And this is why I hate Walmart:

I get to the store, pick out my chosen scooter due for organ donation, get home, and open it up. I find that: a) this scooter has already been beatup and returned to walmart, with stem screws that are stripped off (making its reason for existing useless to me) and b) its friggin' PINK and packed into the wrong box. Thanks Walmart. I was tempted to take back BOTH mangled scooters, drop them on the counter, and nonchalantly ask for a refund. "Why yes ma'am--it appeared to have been run over by a car when I took it out of the box". Super. Now I have TWO useless scooters.

In lighter news--I am once again packing for an international trip. I am going to Aberdeen with 4 of my classmates on Monday for an extended course in offshore survival training. While you may think this means learning how to fend off the advances of love-starved roughnecks, it actually is way cooler than that :-). I get to, among other things, practice escaping from a downed helicopter on the North Sea and jumping from a 90 foot platform into the water. I've taken great delight in freaking out Agi with graphic descriptions of every offshore rig accident of the past 30 years.

In any case--I am looking forward to this trip. I am also going to be hanging out with my brotha-in-law who is chef at a restaurant 45 miles south of Aberdeen. Hope to see all the cool sights--castles, Loch Ness, haggis factories, etc... All the cool Scottish stuff.

Bittersweet as well. I recall that my last "foreign" excursion that was any fun was to Hvar, Croatia in March, setting up a training conference for distributors in SE Europe. That was such a fun, blissful weekend, spent on a gorgeous island with two of my kids.

Seems so long ago... Ironically, that conference is this weekend. Hope it all goes well for the participants.

So here I come, Scotland! I leave Monday, and will be back a couple weeks later. I'm sure I'll have PLENTY of cool pictures to post...

Until then, I am back to my midnight laundry duties and the even more fun task of forgetting this week's twin debacles: BYU's craptacular performance last night Vs. TCU, and the snoozer of a Presidential debate from Wednesday. How the country ended up with these idiots winning their respective party nominations is beyond me. One is the barely restrained socialist wunderkint with a background and experience as barren as Paris Hilton's SAT scores, and the other is a doddering, grimacing, smirk machine who can't seem make a cogent argument on TV to save his life, even though his opponent is as wide-open a target as possible. My dream scenario is for McCain to win and then retire in February. Better that than having the Obaminator win with plans to "spread the wealth around". Yecch. I just left European socialism, only to see it on my doorstep here. Uggh. I weep for the Republic.

Latest Palin scandal...

Dagnamit. I knew she was too good to be true... :-)

Meanderings Schmeanderings...

I have been duly chastised. Apparently my significant other has informed me that just because I now "have a job", and "am slightly more active than a koala bear on sudafed", I can't neglect at least a cursory update to our family blog. So I'm on for a quickie update of our activities over the past ten days.

I've just finished my first two weeks on the new job--its been mainly classroom work in Provo, cramming info into my brain about high-speed drill-bit telemetry, wave theory, and how oil rigs are not only big and expensive, but can go boom-boom if we aren't careful with electricity. AWESOME! Seriously, I've learned more about underground oil formations and the delicate processes involved with sucking it out of the ground. I'm still doing cartwheels over how cool this company is--we had a business presentation Thursday afternoon that underlined again how cutting edge our tech is. No joke--our process is to oil drilling what a Ferrari is to the handcart. The most up-to-date technology currently in use, the process that oil companies and drillbit-tool producers have invested BILLIONS in over the last 50 years, can only send information to the surface at the screaming rate of 10 BITS PER SECOND. Yes, 10 BITS. It actually travels up to the surface on a wave of mud. Our tech sends up info info at speeds up to 100 MB per second. Mwahaha. And we own the patent for the next 17 years.

SO yes. I am still very much excited about my new job. The crew I was hired with is composed of electrical engineers, mechanical engineers, avionics professors, and some IT supergeeks. Which had me questioning, albeit briefly, why the hell I was hired :-) .

Outside of work, we've been busy with other pursuits. I coached my first soccer game yesterday. The boys (Andrew and Aidan) are playing in the city league, and their coach decided his anniversary weekend getaway was more important than leading seven 12-14 year-olds to victory on the field. Has this guy not seen 300 or what??? In any case, I stepped in. Granted, my coaching technique consisted mainly of screaming "good job, ladies!" and "keep those guys out of our kitchen!" , and "lemme see blood! You are all wearing shin guards FOR A REASON!". Yeah, after 5 years in Hungary, I sadly know just as little about soccer as before I left. In any case, we did win our first game of the season 10-6. SO naturally I am going to take all of the credit.

Here's some pics of my awesome results:



This is Andrew, #9.




...and here's Aidan, eye on the goal...



Andrew, taking a breather...



..and team captain Aidan, debuting his "hey ref! I got yer yella caaahd right here!" face. Ah, the little Beckham...


In other news, Ashton threw a tantrum the other day because he was assigned "Beauty and the Beast" as a reading project, and -as a big second grader- I WILL NOT READ A GIRLIE BOOK!!!" and WHY DOESN'T MY TEACHER GET THIS??? DUUUHHH!!". Sigh. This is going to be fun. In other Ashton news, he is pretty excited to get baptized next month. Last of the bunch.

Ali is Ali. Cute as always. Having fun with her new girlfriends. I'm happy she has been making friends with not just the predominate LDS kids, but all the other girls in the small "non-LDS" group as well. After picking her up from a playdate at one these girl's home, I was chatting with said girl's mother, and she indicated how grateful she was for Ali to be so nice and accepting and friendly with her daughter, even though they aren't LDS. This family has been in Nephi for a few years now, and apparently once it was known they weren't LDS and weren't exactly interested in joining our fair community, all the invitations dried up and the non LDS kids (in frigging FOURTH GRADE, mind you!) end up having mostly only each other to play with. Show me a parent that doesn't encourage their 10 year old to invite the non-LDS kid to the birthday party, and I'll show you a parent I want to KICK.IN.THE.TEETH. OK. Now that is off my chest.

Lastly--we just got back tonight from the boys' first ever Court of Honor. Agi's first a well. She was pretty proud to go up and have the boys punch the mother's pins in to her blouse :-). Andrew received his Second Class and FIrst Class advancements, and Aidan received his Tenderfoot and Second Class. After no scouting at all in Hungary for the last 5 years, the boys are making up for lost time. I told the boys that if they want to even sniff at a driver's license, they better be Eagle Scouts first. They are making up for lost time :-)




That's it for me. Agi is off across town putting old people to bed, and I have just put a bunch of young people to bed. Now if you will excuse me, I am going to nightcap my evening by settling onto the couch & rewinding and watching over and over, each of Max Hall's seven touchdown passes from yesterday. BOOOOYAAH! 59-0.

Flub of the day, yet surprisingly awesome..

I'll get to a longer post this weekend--I've been busy all week with the new job during the day and soccer games in the evening. Andrew & Aidan had their first game last night and won 1-0. Gotta love those high scoring edge of your seat scoring frenzies. Almost as fun as the game was watching Agi begin the transformation into rabid US soccer mom, the kind that just might stomp down to the field and rip the head of that sweaty, nervous, 16 year old volunteer referee. Kidding! Sort of. Maybe not. Ok, I'll bring the restraint jacket to the next game :-)

Anywhoo-prior to my larger more meaningful post, which I am sure to get to this weekend, here was a smaller clip from this week's convention coverage. Obviously I loved Palin's speech and am currently enjoying the backlash against MSNB's raving moonbats and everyone else who has tried to "take her down" this week. If you saw her speech, you'll know why. ..

Anyway--this was funny. ABC's Terry Moran didn't even break a sweat on this flub.

I'm thinking Hillary is throwing ashtrays right now....

....and Obama is on the floor in the fetal position, thumb in mouth.

As less-than-enthused that I was about a possible McCain presidency, I think the choice of Sarah Palin as the VP is a masterstroke. Everything I know about this woman is stellar. She's more of a man than Obambi is :-). She's got the most "real" family of anyone that has run for the presidency in my lifetime...




From a few of my preferred commentary sites, I've culled a few awesome "Palinisms" that are sure to catch on...

--Sarah Palin is so tough, she wears polar bear fur when it’s 40 below outside… while the polar bear is still alive.

--Sarah Palin is so tough…she digs for oil with her bare hands and doesn’t ruin her manicure!

--I once saw Sarah Palin punch a hole through a cow just to see what was on the other side.

--Sarah Palin is so tough she glared at Obama and made him start his period.

--Palin is so tough, her Moose kills show blunt force trauma…

--Sarah Palin doesn’t use bait when she is fishing. She merely touches the hook with a bit of her perfume and the fish jump into the boat.

--Sarah Palin is so tough the 1975 Philadephia Flyers won’t play against her.

--Sarah Palin is so tough that John Wayne briefly returned from his grave today to endorse her.

--Sarah Palin doesn’t debate opponents, she debases opponents.

--Sarah Palin is so tough that she makes Barack Obama sit down when he urinates.

--Sarah Palin is so tough she shaves her legs with a blowtorch while putting on her lipstick.

--Sarah Palin is so tough that Osama bin Laden will now star in one of those Southwest Airlines “wanna get away” commercials.

--Sarah Palin is so tough that Chuck Norris wets his pants when she walks into the room.

--Sarah Palin didn’t take off work when she had her baby last Spring. She delivered the baby during a phone conference and finished the day.

--Sarah Palin is so tough that she can single-handedly tame 18 million pumas.


--Sarah Palin is so tough, when the glass ceiling heard of her nomination it didn’t shatter, it just fled in terror.

--Sarah Palin is so tough she sharpens her hunting knives by giving herself a manicure.


My new favorite campaign commercial....

OK OK. He wasn't my first choice. He's not Romney (central casting). Or Fred Thompson (sleepy). Or Guiliani (crimefighter). But he's a heckuva lot more appealing than Huckabee (squirrel-eating mormon-hater). And definitely more qualified than Obama (57 states, uhh, uhhh, uhhhhhmmm).

So here are my two new favorite campaign commercials...