PEACHFRONT SPEAKS

Recent entries july 4, 2018 - 2018-07-04 the triangle continues of courtney, boobear, & nyota - 2018-07-03 Cookie so cute telling, "Hello" to sparrows - 2018-07-01 lovebirb in love - 2018-06-30 wren with fluffffff - 2018-06-24 Read my new book, The 10 Best Things You Can Do For Your Bird at Amazon or at many other fine distributors like Barnes & Noble, iTunes, Kobo, and more. By public demand, and after a delay of an embarrassing number of years, I've finally put my notorious essay, Ender and Hitler: Sympathy for the Superman, free on the fabulous internets. A bibliography of my published books and stories. Here's a simple card-counting FAQ to get you up to speed on the basics. Here's the true story of the notorious DD' blackjack team, told for the first time on the fabulous internets. No other team went from a starting investor's bankroll of zero to winning millions of dollars. A Sadean take on Asimov's classic Three Laws of Robotics can be found in Roger Williams' NOW REVIEWED ON SLASHDOT!!! The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect. Adult readers only please -- explicit sex and violence. For updates on the "Dead Tree Project" and other topics, you may visit the official fan site, Passages in the Void.. My Bird Lists -- My Louisiana State Life List, My Yard List and, tah dah, My World Life List. HEY! What happened to the Peachfront Conure Files? The world's only OFFICIAL Peachfront Conure site now features free peachfront conure coverage, including a magazine length Intro to Conures previously published in American Cage-Bird Magazine, now free on the web. I offer the best free Peachfront Conure information on the internet. If you have great Peachfront Conure info, stories, or photos to share, contact me so I can publicize your pet, your breeding success, your great photograph, etc. on my site. Thanks.

d.c. on a discount: getting there 2011-10-18 - 9:22 a.m. the sound of gunfire, off in the distance i'm getting used to it now lived in a brownstone, lived in a ghetto lived all over this town--david byrne The last time I flew into D.C. it was on Eastern Airlines so how long ago was that? I've visited D.C. twice, on both ends of the economic spectrum, once staying in a tent on the C&O Canal in the summer, so that one of my most vivid memories of the trip is Chuck Will's-Widow calling endlessly, relentlessly, hour after hour, all through the night. A bird I have never seen, a bird that is probably a rare bird now, a bird that disturbed my sleep for hours on end for a few days a few decades ago...a bird that is not on my life list even though the ABA would allow it, because I can't stand to put a "heard only" on my list. Even a "heard only" that's a "heard only" for the overwhelming majority of hobby birders out there. And then the other trip, which was an airfare, hotel, banquet, and I don't remember what all, not just for me, but for my parents. I don't remember seeing their hotel room but since it was the same hotel, and they disappeared there for hours, no doubt it was a romantic suite of the same quality, tee hee. I tell you what, it was a far cry from the Holiday Inn and a far cry from a tent on the C&O Canal. I wandered from room to room and kept finding bathrooms and bedrooms, and it really did seem like the kind of place where you book the whole wealthy immigrant family fleeing certain slaughter in some distant war-torn land...except that it was just me, drifting from room to room. A different time. Less than a decade later, Ronald Reagan would get into office with his plan to get rid of grants and scholarships and get students to "invest" in their own educations by getting into debt with student loans. No more giving someone a scholarship and a foofy trip to give them a taste of the good life they could supposedly earn if they finished the degree the scholarship was paying for. Well, don't get me started. It's like the girl I was playing poker with a short while back. She says, "Well, I went to Berkeley but only because I was accepted into a GOOD school and now I have $230,000 worth of debt and 30 percent of the class hasn't had a job offer." Wait a minute. You weren't ACCEPTED into Berkeley in any sense that made sense in the 70s. If they really wanted you, they would have given you a scholarship. "Accepting" some poor fool willing to take out guaranteed loans in the amount of nearly half a million dollars isn't a statement about your intelligence -- it's a statement about how they want the nearly half a million dollars from one sucker. Now what's done is done, she's screwed for life since student loans can't be excused by bankruptcy, and she's destroyed her own future. Too late for me to say anything useful, so I say nothing. But honestly...if you're so smart, where's your math skills? Where's your simple reasoning skills? You don't pay THEM to be educated if being educated is so good for society. THEY PAY YOU. Once you pay THEM, it's about them extracting money from you; it isn't about how you're so brilliant that it's a shame to let a mind go to waste. It's about how you're so exploitable that you'll pay to have your ego massaged. The GI Bill, my scholarship, other scholarships of the 50s through the 70s, were meant to put money and education into middle-class hands. Student loans are meant to put money in the hands of the bankers. This ain't rocket science, people. Sheesh. Back on topic. So I've stayed in the tent, and I've stayed in the suite, and I've never thought much more about it. Then one day DH mentioned that when he went to DC they went to some Air Force function and he never got to the see the Spirit of Saint Louis or the Hope Diamond or, really, anything much of a much that wasn't rah-rah Air Force related. As it happened, he had recently applied for one of those Delta Amex cards that give you a free year of membership and 50,000 SkyMiles. Mmm-kay. Turns out 50,000 SkyMiles and $10 will buy you two round-trip tickets MSY-DCA. Done. Getting the hotel was a little more intense. DH isn't one for staying in a tent on the C&O Canal, no matter how many tent spaces might be open in the cool of October. (I suspect that most of the area is now suburban slums rather than trees and field anyway -- crack and the suburban slum being another little gift from the 1980s.) I'm not one for staying at a $500 a night hotel because, as Lindsay Lohan said, I Don't Pay. Yet the cruel harsh reality of life is that no one was going to comp me some foo-foo hotel, so I had to shop around. I've never paid so much for a Priceline hotel but I have to admit that we had a great location. It was pretty entertaining to bid for the hotel, in a sick sort of way. I'd bid $70, and they'd send me some message like, based on our historical records, you have a less than zero chance of getting a four star hotel on Dupont Circle for $70 but we'll throw in $8 a night so... and so on and so forth. They finally beat my head in, and I paid $131 a night minus that $8 a night they gave me for just being obnoxious. But, still, I keep thinking, c'mon, it's Priceline, I pay $42 a night for a Priceline hotel, not $123!!! Sheesh!!! And if you think to yourself, well, only an idiot would pay more than $40 a night for a non refundable hotel room, let's just say, I searched Washington up and down, and plenty of folks pay $200 a night for a non-refundable hotel room. And I mean, direct from the hotel web site, without Priceline intervention. So I dunno. I still keep thinking I could have done better, but it was the MLK memorial weekend, and I dunno. At some point, I had better start to talk about the actual vacation, instead of trips gone by and discounts grabbed. So, without further ado... Thursday, October 13 Since it was DH's award ticket, and he is a humble base member, there was no way to win him an upgrade. In fact, I had to split our reservation numbers to get myself upgraded. As soon as I called the Gold line, "Ryan" said, "OK, there's no chance for Roger, but I'll upgrade YOU right now." Done. Sold. I said Roger would understand, and Ryan said he would do the same thing. Beautiful weather, flight on time. For years and years I had two drink coupons from Continental Airlines that we got for volunteering to be bumped but then we didn't get bumped and then since we're not usually CO flyers, we never flew CO in economy again, only in first/business, so we never used the coupons. So now CO is getting merged, and I figured it's use 'em or lose 'em on these coupons so I swapped them with another guy who rarely flies Delta/Northwest. Neither of my coupons had dates, but they were both old. Both of his coupons had dates, one of which was an expired Northwest coupon from 2009. "But it will work, really!" he assured me. I had tried to use it before, and the FA brushed it off, not because he saw the date, but because for some reason I've forgotten he was giving me a free drink. Score! So anyway, I gave the coupons to DH with the instructions, "Try to use the older one first." Meanwhile, I'm in first class. Pre-board cocktail, yes. Thai chicken for lunch with more free-flowing white wine, yes. We definitely didn't have any of the Temperance Jesus FAs on this flight. I like to keep track of my drinks but he was topping me off before I finished so, you know, what do you do? Heh. Meanwhile, DH reported that the cheerful FA accepted the older coupon without a blink. It's a short flight, without a second drink service, but when he drifted past the exit row again, DH asked for another bottle of wine. Well, they were out of the coach drinks...so he poured him some red wine from First Class and declined the coupon. He shoots, he scores! Nice views of DC from our side of the plane, the left side, as we landed at DCA. Our bag, as a foofy First Class bag, was one of the first out, and we took the metro into town. There was a tiny bit of pooch screw since we had two choices as to which exit to take out of the Metro, and we took the wrong one, but we eventually stumbled into our hotel room behind the broom closet. There was only one foo-foo bathrobe instead of two, but I was too tired to fight about it. We stumbled a block or two and found the one cheap dive bar with a gambling/Nevada theme. Ate the low-priced but tasty burger. We both ordered beers but I don't know why. Can't drink beer when I fly. I pushed it over to DH, and he handled the job manfully. Then we went back to the room and located the handmade Satsuma vodka. Hey. You can take the girl out of Louisiana but... Peachfront's Note: We have now finally arrived in DC. Stay tuned! back - next All Rights Reserved, Copyright 2002-2017 by Elaine Radford