'Too Busy To Hate'? My @$&!

I'm off to Atlanta today, to visit the new arrival, my sister Maureen's new baby Avery (See Sept. 4 posts for pictures). It's been almost a year since I've seen my parents, my brother and my sisters, so I'm very happy about that. It'll be so good to see them--we really don't get together often enough.

What I'm not happy about is the travel it takes to get there. I love to travel, but dear God do I hate flying. What's worse than getting stuck between a huge fat guy and a screaming baby for three hours, crammed into a seat built for a 6-year-old while some stranger reclines the seat in front of you so he's basically resting his head in your lap? Actually, I can think of something worse than that--being stuck at an airport for three hours. But I guess it can't be helped.

One other thing that can't be helped is that my sister and her family live in Atlanta. I don't want to make too big a deal out of this, because I know my family thinks I'm too negative in this regard, but Atlanta is without a doubt my least-favorite large American city. They've taken the joyless strip-mall culture and congestion of L.A., gotten rid of the beautiful beaches and constant sunshine, added boatloads of humidity and a weird superiority/inferiority complex, and plunked the whole thing down in the middle of Georgia of all places. Plus Ted Turner lives there. I'm going to be with family and that's the most important thing, but man, I sure liked it when Maureen and her family lived in Miami. I mean, if you have to fly across the country anyway, you might as well be close to South Beach and Key West.

My great dream is to get my whole clan together out here in God's Country. But as long as I'm living in the Fortress of Solitude and it's whopping 500 square feet, I think that's pretty unlikely.