Summer Vacation 2016 part I : The trip makes me need a vacation

Disclosure :  As I have said before, there is not a day that goes by that I dont thank the luck I have had and the upbringing I was born into.  It is the luck of the draw really.  I can complain about piddly things while I know many many other people have real big life threatening worries that they must live through every day.  I try to send my heart to them also.  God be willing all good people will be blessed in the end. 

Well.  At the time of this writing, my last post was at the end of JUNE.  Two months ago.  Kind of a long interval.  I pray the millions of my readers (take that statement with a mountain of salt.  I hope I have more readers than just the `bots` checking out to see if I have used any licensed material) didn't think I had packed it up and left the blogisphere.  I have not.  HOWEVER.   I did do some packing.

As I have said before, I often get nervous before a trip HERE. and also here some




Five days before this trip I was planning how it should go and getting nervous.  It was our big summer vacation trip going to visit Grandma in another section of the world.  I was running around trying to take care of everything and get my business in order which was a bit more difficult this time as I am moving my office down a floor in the building where I am.  It just meant that it made things more ugly,  cutting off my Internet connection, people yelling at me to get things done, and the likes, which puts a wrench in actually getting things done.  This always makes me want to cancel the whole thing and fagetaboutit and just stay home and sleep the whole ENTIRE time.  But that wouldn't be good, or responsible, or father like now would it?

But the thought of travelling, even moving,  can get me into a panic.

Well the big day came.  It always does.  We made it to the airport on time.  We usually do.  I have never been at fault for being late for a plane.  But what made me more nervous this time was that we were going through an airport (no names at this time) which had been a true hassle and nightmare the last couple times using it.  Long customs lines, and getting from one point to the other by bus and just so much moving from place to place, at an airport for jimminys sake.  The airport should move you.  You shouldn't have to move much in an airport.  Kind of silly reasoning these days when getting from one end of some airports to the other can be a trip in itself.   But to my utter bewilderment everything was OK.  And this coming on the tale end of world scares about terrorist attacks at airports etc.  I think there had been an attack at the Turkish airport a couple days before we left.  

What was disappointing and annoying to say the least was the airport at the OTHER end of the trip.  Since we were flying from overseas to the US, we had to go through customs and pick up our luggage and then check it back for the last connecting flight.  And this was not a huge airport.   But that whole process took well over an hour, an hour and a half.  And this after a 7 hour flight.

Imagine 500 people in this area

You have to go through one line and get a picture of all travellers, then go through another line to get through customs.  Each line was a couple hundred people.  Well, just as we were getting to the customs police officer to get questioned after swimming through two lines, my youngest daughter threw up.  This time I did not catch it in my hand nor did I even attempt to.  She had had only  water, so it wasn't much, but still.  They used to let parents with small children go ahead in the line, but not here it seems.  So we were standing there for over an hour after a seven hour flight.  THIS is too much for a little girl.  Out of contempt for the airport I just let her throw up on the rug.  

To be fair the customs policeman was nice to me then even though I had carried a forbidden apple from the plane onto American soil.  No fruits allowed.  Can you believe the dog sniffer sniffed out my apple?  Or maybe it was actually the leftover chicken bone.  Good nose on that pooch.  And maybe I should write the airport a letter asking if this particular day was bad because of some crisis or whatever.  But then we still had to get to the other end of the airport and it seems my daughter was in full movement sickness mode.  We were on a walking escalator and she did it again. And again I did nothing and just let the throw up go down between the cracks on the escalator.   Our gate for the connecting flight had to be a half hour walk away.  Down this long long hallway with no sense to it, no rooms off of it, no outlets, no stores just an amazingly long hallway.  I am not in airport construction nor design, so I don't know, but it made no sense to me.  It only serves to make people later for their plane, or good for movies of people running down the endless hall trying to catch their plane. But for poor little girls tired already from travel and sick to their stomach the consequences are not pretty.

Once we got to our gate both my children fell asleep, it being around 2 am our old time.

I knew what was coming upon my daughters waking, and it did.  This time, I had a Kleenex out and my hand ready.  This time I caught it and then I carried her under one arm and "it"in the other hand down to the nearest bathroom, leaving the other daughter sleeping stretched out on the waiting room chairs. Oblivious.  I got the sick one cleaned up and changed her clothes as I hadnt caught it all.  

A man came up to me and said that he was a children¨s physician and if he could do anything to help?  And then his wife also asked if she could bless my daughter, which I had no reason to deny, the blessing that is.  At the least we now had the insurance of the doctor on our flight AND Jesus on our side, so I figured nothing more could go wrong.  No more bad would happen. 

She just had one more throw up to do once we got on the plane for our last connecting flight.  This one we caught in the seat pocket doggy throw up bag.  The lady sitting behind us said she was a children's doctor and if there was anything she could do, let her know.  I see, this was the flight of children's doctors going to some conference or other in the Northern woods on a lake.  Maybe.  I declined her help and she proceeded to talk to her seat mate the whole journey (luckily just half an hour) about how she loves driving her new big pick up truck and how she missed it even now.  I frantically looked in all the other seat pockets for another throw up bag, but this time not for my daughter but for myself.  I found none.  There might be more trouble coming from me and I hadn't been blessed by Jesus.

Oh man, I need a vacation after this trip.       

Bully part 2

I am not an angel.  But more angel than devil.  That is to say,  I did bully and harassed some people when I was a small kid, but mostly I was a bystander and didn't mess with people.  I can remember more bullying on me than me harassing other people.

I did harass this one girl when I was 7 or 8 years old.  Followed her home several times, perhaps chasing her or called her names.  I think it came to an end either when her parents called or her big brother came calling on me.  I think that effectively made me think twice about harassing others and from there after I was more a victim.  I still am deeply ashamed of even my little bit of bullying.  At a high school reunion in the early 2000s I apologized to the girl face to face for five minutes and told her how awful I feel about it to this day.   She let me off the hook and said it wasn't so terrible.  I didn't really do anything terrible.  All the same...  I wasn't good.  Shameful.

But I have to tell a short story of another middle school bullying incident which was just brutal.  It was brutal to watch even though, sadly at the time, I think most others just put up with it and really didn't do anything about it.  It disturbs me to this day thinking about it.   Someone should have alerted the authorities about what was going on.  But, I don't think High School kids work(ed) that way.

Well, in actuality there wasn't any violence or physical interaction, it was mostly just words.  So one guy, who was kind of nerdy himself and definitely was not handsome, though he was built with strength from sports he participated in, but not a regular sports dude, found out that it was quite easy to pick on this other guy of the same age who definitely was of small build with not much strength and on his way to becoming a math geek.  Whenever the bully saw this guy he would call him the stupidest name, namely his own name attached to the victims name.  But it got the victim so angry.  Or the bully would walk behind the victim and try to step on the heel of his shoe as kids did at that age to get the shoe off.

See, nothing really bad.  It never came to blows even though sometimes the victim would turn around and try to strike the bully,  in which case the bully would easily dodge the fist and laugh at him.  What made it horrible was that it was so incessant.  It was continual, whenever the bully saw the kid, easily 5 times a day which made it so disgusting.  At most someone would say, Dude, lay off the guy already.  And the bully would say, "yeah I know, its just so much fun".

I don't recall the exact year, but the victim did leave our school, I think after the second year (in 8th grade).  He went to another school in the area, a private school from what we heard.

Then he came back to our school in the second to last year or even the last.  And my how he had changed.

He had turned into a long haired burnout which is someone who smokes a lot, and not cigarettes.  On occasion he would ask me if I had some dope or if I wanted to smoke dope with him, I guess because he knew I was alternative and thought I smoked.  I didn't.  He was not a geek at all, or rather he was exactly a dopehead on a moped.  Still small in stature.  He wasn't doing well in school, nor did he seem to care.

What had happened to him?  Had he been bullied in the other school too and the whole thing had just drove him to drugs and dopeheadedness?  Or was it a natural progression from math geek to pothead? That was possible.  A lot of kids changed a lot going from 12 years old to 15.  But what worries me is that the incessant bullying from the first guy had just ground him down creating scars deeper than skin deep.  That the bullying was the direct cause of his dropping out of the regular school kid life and just destroyed him.  I wouldn't doubt it.  But even worse is that it may have scarred him for life by effecting which direction he was taking in life.  Or maybe it caused such a detour of his life that it took him so much longer to get back into the swing of life.  Or maybe he isn't even with us anymore.  I cant find his name on the regular social networks, but that's because his name is somewhat common.  Or maybe he is hiding out to this day.

The bully, nothing happened to him.  In fact he is an attorney in the city he grew up in.  I was told by another friend what happened to him, and his trajectory through life was fairly straight and successful.  I am told he has a big mouth just like he had in high school which probably contributes to his success.  Also probably contributing to his success is his belief in himself and the thought that he is on the right side. He argues strongly because he strongly believes he is correct.  He has done no wrong in his mind.  And he is able to drive to work every day and argue his clients cases because he has the strength of personality to do so.  Probably if I met him toady he would barely remember, or would just say, "oh yeah, I remember that."

It makes me hope there will be justice sometime, maybe in the after life.
This is not how I want my kids to grow up, to bully.  They will know from the beginning that bullying is wrong.  

There are pictures of the bully, but I wont put them up.   Instead: to the victims, stay strong.