The good word from A-town

Asheville, of course.

Lying in this bed in the front room of my grandparents house takes me way back. I remember when I came to camp up here in NC and I was so miserable and homesick I cried the whole time. I missed my parents so much. Not that I don't still miss them when I'm gone, but I can at least be away from home for more than two weeks without crying the whole time. In retrospect I know that a lot of what I thought was homesickness was just one of the side affects of intense sleep deprivation from being in the "big girl dorm" where no one ever slept - but how was I supposed to know that then?

This week was a long week. I'm so happy to have four days off this weekend. I ended up getting a lot of extra flying in, which is great financially, but it wears you out. Yesterday we flew to Mexico and back. It was just over 7 hours of actual flight time. I enjoy going down there for the most part though. The people are usually nice and not demanding. Those flights also seem to be more interesting for one reason or another. On the way down we had to deport two men. I think it was a paperwork thing in customs and they weren't dangerous or anything. One of them got airsick twice, becoming the first grown man to puke on my flight. I don't think people really believe me when I tell them I feel their pain. We also had a 94 year old deaf lady who didn't speak English. I don't know who lets people like that fly alone. It would scare me so bad to send my mother/grandmother/aunt out on her own like that. She couldn't read or write, which we come across a lot on there, so we filled out her forms, for her. Then we found out she couldn't even write her name so we tried to put her fingerprint on there by writing on her finger and stamping it. Evidently this is a very common way of signing your name if you can't write. I scribbled on my fingers trying to find a pen that would work, but it was a lousy print. Hopefully she didn't have any problems getting through customs. It always surprises me when I'm handing out forms and have someone tell me they can't write. I don't know if it's just Mexico or that generation (most of them are older). I'm sure if we had to fill out forms on US flights I'd find out that a lot more people can't read. One man was really embarrassed about it and was explaining that he had moved back and forth between the US and Mexico a lot as a child and never got a chance. I felt bad for him and fortunate that it's such a given here that we read and write.

After a delicious salmon dinner this evening, Wheel of Fortune, and Jeopardy, we had finally got the wireless connection set up and had a crash course on computers here at the grandparents house. It's fun to open people up to what computers have to offer. I'm proud of my grandparents cause they're willing to learn and try all these crazy new technological things.