Peculiar Behavior

We made it back to Socal, arriving on the tail end of a record-breaking heat wave that brought temperatures up to 115 degrees, territory usual reserved for our Little House in the Desert in San Tan Valley (formerly Queen Creek) AZ.   Other than a few gate changes and a half hour flight delay in Dallas (truly nits among the possible difficulties to be encountered in flying these days), our return was uneventful.    Now, it’s Top Sites Tuesday #79, Two Thoughts on Tuesday, and I’d have expected that eleven hours in airports and airplanes would have provided a multitude of thoughts.  But looking back, I could only find one.

When we arrived in Dallas, I found that we’d been upgraded to First Class but that the only seats available were window seats, one behind another.   This creates several issues, the most significant being that my wife can be claustrophobic in a window seat.  The second is that we really like to sit together, even though I spend the flight barricaded behind my Bose Noise Canceling Headphones to avoid my own particular flight ailment, noisipeopleitis.   Once we were on board and a man started to settle in on the aisle next to my wife, she asked if he’d mind switching with me.  Now, as a business flyer with many miles behind me, I’ve always treasured my aisle seats and on occasion, after an arduous day I’d decline to switch to a window, even for a woman as charming as my wife.   But this particular gentleman scowled and grumbled … to the point that my wife said, It’s OK.  Don’t bother … but then collected his things stood at my aisle, waiting to change seats.  I thanked him profusely as I passed, feeling his aisle-seat pain, but he wouldn’t even look at me.   Now, I really do appreciate spending the three hours next to my wife, but here’s my thought: if you’re going to be the nice guy, why wouldn’t you do it with grace?  Why to some degree nullify the gallant act by playing the grouch?  Martyrdom is not attractive …

If I hadn’t gone to my park this morning to write, that might have been my only thought (a trip, by the way, cut short by lack of pen and the sultry eighty-five degree weather).   There is a dog-woman I’ve posted about before who, like many other dog-people, likes to bring her Lab to the park to chase and bark at squirrels.  Most people accommodate their pooch’s obsession with fluffy-tailed rodents during their own walks, but his particular woman drives around the park with her dog in the back until she sees a squirrel, then parks and lets her dog out to bark, sometimes pointing it out to him so he’ll know where to direct his woofs.   She’s apparently adopted a new technique.   As I was leaving the park, I observed her car parked under a large tree.   She was dropping handfuls of peanuts strategically around the base of the tree to attract squirrels for her faithful dog, Woofie.  I suppose she’s being green, saving gas.  But I wonder how she came to have her own obsession with fluffy-tailed rodents.

We humans are a most peculiar species, sometimes amazingly so, sometimes annoyingly so and sometimes just peculiarly so.   So.   If you’d like to be somewhat amazingly so, please push my button … gently … and make me number one on Top Sites Tuesday Number 79.

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