New Shoes in the Rain

I've been on the road quite a bit lately, and about to embark on two more trips, but more on that later.  Suffice it to say that I still believe that whatever doesn't kill us indeed makes us stronger, so I'm rapidly gaining strength in that model.  I had a very interesting day of travel two Mondays ago, starting with a call around 4:00 AM from Delta Airlines' computer.  I was being informed that my flight, scheduled to leave at 7:15, would now leave at 8:52.  Nice to know, but the auto-message didn't detail my newly changed itinerary.  The repeat call at 5:45 told me that, so I decided to give up and get up after all.  That flight was diverted from to Knoxville en route to Atlanta (from my home base in Lexington, KY) due to a mechanical issue, and I waited there until late in the afternoon to get to Atlanta and connect to my final destination.  Despite these inconveniences, the Delta staffers with whom I dealt all were uniformly pleasant, friendly, and as helpful as

Commenting on a few unrelated things noticed over the past week or two..... Did you hear about the flap over the Gap's proposed logo that was suddenly ditched in favor of keeping the current, navy blue box with "GAP" in thin white letters?  Apparently the image of the new logo (you'll have to find a news item somewhere to find an image) popped up somewhere online and people actually debated this via Twitter, Facebook and elsewhere, and public opinion was so heavily against the new logo that the Gap announced they're withdrawing the new logo and retaining the current one. Honestly, people, do we not have anything better to do than spend online time arguing about the validity of a retailer's corporate logo?  And what does this say about a company the size of the Gap, which also operates Old Navy (and thus are responsible for those absolutely stupid television commercials) and Banana Republic, that they would be cowed by what I suspect is limited public react

For the first time in almost nine years, I made a trek into the southeastern part of Kentucky for business purposes.  And I'm always struck by the natural beauty of Kentucky's "mountain" region (trust me, these aren't really mountains, but for local purposes they'll do nicely), particularly in the early fall when leaves are just starting to turn.  Yesterday was no exception, and here's a sampling of what I saw: The Mountain Parkway is still a two-lane road for a bit less than half of its length, so windy is its path that an added passing lane is all that could be built to resemble a modern, four lane highway. There are passages (in some cases several miles long) where the highway rests literally at the bottom of the hollow ("holler" if you're from eastern Kentucky), and still winds significantly.  One has to look upward quite a bit to even see the sky! Despite some of the natural beauty, there is still quite a lot of evidence of poverty