Monday, October 6, 2008

Hard to keep up with such an exciting life

A few weekends ago the Plano Hot Air Balloon Festival occurred. It's been ages since I got to fly. I had forgotten how much fun it is to fly. I joined Randy's hot air balloon crew about 15 years ago. Back then he had a balloon called Sky Check. It was a great balloon, very pretty and very easy to distinguish from all of the other balloons. That balloon wore out, and it was time to get a new balloon. We call it the Peacock. It looks a lot like the channel 5 NBC peacock. . . but it also looks like a gazillion other balloons. It's a total pain in the ass on the eyes to decipher which is our balloon. I flew with Randy on the morning of a competition, so we took off from the P.E.S.H. parking lot with a whole lotta other balloons. It was beautiful. As we took off, we waved to the poor souls left on the ground. Admittedly, I have an urge to spit on them, but that is three years of teaching middle school still wrecking havoc with my abilities to behave like a grown-up speaking. My bad. There were lots of fun balloons flying, but my favorites were the dragon . . . grrrr and the flower. It took off, landed, deflated? then reinflated and took off again. Very cool. It is amazing how small everything looks from the air. Admittedly the pink jeep actually was a mini vehicle. Some kid left it out overnight, so when we flew over at about 7:30am, there it sat in the circle with a couple of real cars. Do you remember the old Twilight Zones? There was one where the camera starts on a man who is running around a town when he finally realizes the town and houses are all part of a "dollhouse" town playset for a kid who is 80 times the size of the original guy . . . .There are lots of neighborhoods in Plano that alllll have manicured lawns, fences, perfect yards and pretty pools. My picture fails to do justice to the Twilight Zone atmosphere of the town as we sailed over.

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