Happy 4th of July
Happy 4th of July dear blog readers, illicit government eavesdroppers and web crawling 'bots. I hope that you had the opportunity to celebrate Independence Day like the forefathers always intended, with a cheap domestic beer in one hand, a hamburger in the other and a bucket of freedom fries in all of their vein clogging goodness finely balanced on your lap. I know I did, although instead of a barbeque, I chose to (well, was forced to) conduct my celebration in the nation’s capital (well, the nation’s capital’s airport’s restaurant’s bar’s seating area’s chair).
Today certainly did not go as planned, but it ended up being a day of many fortuitous coincidences for myself and a fellow traveler. A long story cut short in the interest of your Gen Y attention span and my desire to go to sleep, my flight back to Cary connected through DCA (that’s Regan National for the non-consultants out there). That last leg ended up being delayed by over three hours, which allowed me to accomplish something that I had always wanted to do while living in Baltimore: get to see the fireworks in D.C. But the happenstances don’t end there, or more specifically, they get much more interesting. I struck up a conversation with a fellow traveler who was flying to RDU (Raleigh-Durham, like duh) from Michigan. Turns out that after 40 years and two marriages which ended horribly, one in a sudden and unexpected death and one in divorce, he ended up reuniting with his high school sweetheart. As the mystery man explained to me, it all started when his company’s Intranet was shut down for service (ok, I guess it all started when God said ‘boo’ and the universe spontaneously occurred or however else you care to explain our existence, but you know what I mean). He decided to surf the web but was continuously annoyed with pop up ads for a classmates tracking website. Finally he relented to the incessant marketing, and cautiously signed up for the web page, believing it was there only to extract membership fees. To his astonishment, he found the name of his long lost love on the site and while still skeptical, the disenchanted man sent her a message to try and reestablish contact.
“I was very much surprised when she sent me a message back only two hours later”
“Clearly you don’t understand how this new age contraption called ‘e-mail’ works”
“What?”
“Nothing, go on with your story”
The rest is … well, not history as it just happened, but just past-tense-event-o-ry. So the love struck man was returning from a wonderful weekend of “visiting” his sweetheart, who had (fortunately for him) also divorced a few years earlier. The man was so smitten that he even showed me pictures of the woman, from both her high school years and how she looks now. All I have to say is that I was fortunate he didn’t know what a MILF was. Now the skeptics among us say that it’s just a fleeting moment and that it will never last, but I like to look on the positive side of life – with such a good looking mom, the daughter's bound to be hot. Happy 4th of July everybody!