Can't leave this scene behind

If I was going to play a joke on somebody, I would ask them to take my shift for "ordering open office hours" and tell them its up in room 749 and then laugh as they sit there alone in a conference room with their laptop.

Actually maybe these office hours are real; someone else just came in. But that's not important. I got to program something really cool at the end of last week, so my job isn't too bad.

Flying is, for the moment, pretty cool. I flew from Seattle to some place on the coast called Hoqium, and it was awesome because I was alone. I didn't have someone asking me questions every two seconds, and nobody knew when I screwed up, and I didn't get a lecture after each landing. And when I was maneuvering to enter the traffic pattern, I got a spare second to glance down at the tiny cars on the ground. They looked like toys, as if part of an elaborate train set.

When I got to Hoqium there was such an incredible headwind that when I landed, the plane looked as if it was just barely crawling over the runway. In reality is was going about...23 miles per hour relative to the ground, but that's pretty slow for a landing. It was fun. Then, after landing, I was waiting at the threshold of the runway to takeoff again, with a plane just coming up behind me, and I notice the baggage door was open. I wasn't sure what to hope for--whether I should hope the guy behind me didn't notice the baggage door, or that he did notice and thus wouldn't wonder why I suddenly taxied onto the grass and stopped my engine. There is a possibility that the baggage door was open the whole flight, but it might have simply popped open on the landing--it was a bouncy one.

Then I got a haircut because I had a date that night. I somewhat offended the person cutting my hair because I told him I worked at Union Station, and he thought my building has a glass roof with a waterfall, and I told him it doesn't. I've since identified a building nearby that looks like the one he was talking about, but I've never been inside.

Then I met up with some girl from the internet. We met at a bar in yet another town around here that I'd never heard of. Like every other girl that has given me directions, she gave them in the form of "get off the highway, turn right, go through 2.5 traffic lights, stop on the corner and talk to a guy named Pete, he'll point which way to go..." while, like most guys that I know, I prefer to know where something is. I prefer to give and receive directions in the form of addresses, lat/long coordinates, and recently, radials from airports. Unfortunately neither method worked; google didn't know where this place was, and she told me the wrong road in her directions, and my GPS thought the bar was inside a middle school. I circled a confusing five block radius for an hour looking for a road that didn't really exist. On the bright side, she turned out to be an actual girl.

I think I'm going to try to have a life while finishing these flying lessons. I'm accustomed to focusing on one thing at a time. It helps that it will be cloudy this week. Might try to go salsa dancing again--hopefully all of my moves haven't gone stale.

Oh, also during my haircut I made two discoveries that cancled each other out: apparently I have a receding hairline, and also apparently someone invented shampoo that prevents hair loss. I would tell you the chemicals/hormones involved, but to spell them right I'd have to read them directly off the bottle, so just take my word for it. The hair cutter person could have been lying, but he suggested this nioxy stuff before I told him my office didn't have a waterfall in the roof, so I think he was being straight with me. Good thing, too. I recently watched some French movie called Last Tango in Paris, where this old guy with a receded hairline has a really creepy affair with some French girl, who shoots him at the end of the movie because he asked what her name was. I don't want to end up like him. Seriously? I shouldn't be allowed to edit my netflix queue unsupervised.

In summary, I feel like I am kind of having a life again, even if its marginal. I am technically meeting new people, and am sort of staying on top of the whole grooming/clean apartment thing. If I could just spare some time to buy a real coffee table, I'd be in good shape.