Catch Up Bloggery

I missed blogging yesterday...I guess it just went right by me.

It's early Saturday morning and I don't have much to say yet. Yesterday was uneventful, except for learning that my brand-new employee's grandfather died and she said she had to go to Denver to handle arrangements...and suggested she might be gone quite some time and would understand if we cannot keep the position open. Starting over. Crap!

I drove back to Dallas from Austin yesterday. Driving on IH-35 is a mind-numbing experience. It's unlike road travel that I used to enjoy. Instead, it's an hours-long assault on one's nerves, with speeding trucks careening from lane to lane, tailgaters for whom drivers who keep it steady at 85 miles per hour in the slow lane are 'in the way,' and idiots who attempt the enter the bumper-to-bumper crowded highway at a safe, sensible, forty miles per hour.

It was good to be able to sleep in my own bed last night.

Today, there will be a memorial service for a woman I used to know in Dallas. She was an association executive who was fired about 10 years ago from her very cushy and very long-term job completely unexpectedly. It affected her very deeply and I am told she never got over it. A few years ago, she and her husband bought a bar in a small town in Colorado...a complete change of lifestyle. She died last month of a heart attack at age 63. I did not know her well, but I may go to the service anyway. I remember a touching piece from NPR's This I Believe radio program that I heard last year. I looked it up a while ago. It explains why it's important to try to do all those inconvenient things we'd rather avoid doing, when doing them will have meaning to someone else. I'd like to be the sort of person who makes a difference in others' lives. So I think I should go.

My wife and I are meeting a board member from a client association for dinner topmorrow night. He and his partner of many years are visiting Dallas on business but will take advantage of their time here to visit places of interest. He and his partner are exceedingly nice guys who I admire and respect. They are among the few members of association clients who I truly enjoy being around socially. They share many of my political attitudes and beliefs. The fact that they are gay is a non-issue from my perspective, but I hear comments about them from other members of the association from time to time. It pisses me off, but I let it slide, the same way they do. They are staying in an old refurbished hotel that was built in the 1940s in the Oak Cliff section of Dallas. We'll meet them at their hotel to get a look at the place, which my wife and I do not recall seeing before. Then, off to dinner, probably ethnic food of one sort of another. There are lots of good places in Oak Cliff, which is arguably the most politically and socially progressive area in Dallas.