I'm in love

with Amex.

They charge a hefty fee each year, and of course I grumble when it's deducted each year - but you know what that fee is? It's dumbness insurance. For all the times you bought something you shoudln't have or gave your number to someone you shouldn't have or lost the card and just need someone's shoulder to cry on. The fee guarantees you a real person at the end of the phone who will extend a sympathetic ear and try and help.

And really - what more could I ask for.

I've had my Delta Amex card since the beginning of 2007. So, let's see... that's about 3.5 years. And just today, today, I thought to check my card and make sure that my Delta number was listed correctly on the card. And it wasn't! I had the wrong Delta number linked to my Amex.

Which might sound petty to most of you. But it means that all this time, for the past 3.5 years, that I've been spending freely on my Amex and thinking I was stacking the miles - someone else was earning them all the time.

So I called the friendly voice at the Amex helpline, and explained my quandary.
"That's ok, we'll update your Delta number right now so that you start earning miles to your correct membership right away," the rep told me cheerily.
She made it a point not to say what I'm sure she was thinking (it took 3.5 years for you to figure this out, lady?), and for this, I was grateful.

So I thanked her for her help, and was about to hang up the phone and resign myself to starting earning miles from scratch, when suddenly she added:
"By the way, just so you know, you've earned over 72,000 miles over the past three years. We'll transfer those over too."
I was stunned. Really? Three years of my error, and Amex was going to make it right by me? And as you know, I have no sophistication in such situations. I don't even dream of aspiring to have sophistication. So I blurted out:
"Really? Three years of my error, and you'll still transfer the points over?"
The rep laughed. "Yes, Ms McDelta, we'll still transfer the points over, no problem."

She didn't say what I'm sure she was thinking (that's what you pay that hefty annual fee for, lady), and for that, I'm also grateful.

Infact, I'm just grateful all around.

A personalised note

Each week before leaving on a flight, Delta leaves me a little note to find when I return home from work. "Miss you!", "Have a great week!" some little spousal quip of the sort. And he signs off each note with a little smiley. It's a loving gesture and a cherished part of our routine. I guess I hadn't quite appreciated the amount of self-personalization that actually went into the note, particularly into the smiley. Until a few weeks ago, Delta picked himself up a pair of cheaters at the local pharmacy, to help with night time reading. It's a big transition, the day you find out you need glasses, if you've never needed them before your entire life.

I hadn't quite appreciated the enormity of the moment, I guess. But it must have traumatised him senseless. Because nowadays, I've noticed that each note is being signed off with:

A stroll in the hills

I am absolutely positively beside myself with excitement.

Since I was supposed to go to Seattle for work this week, and since we couldn't make it to Bermuda this weekend (see aforementioned citizenship saga), we decided that Delta would come join me on the West coast instead this weekend and we would dapple in a bit of West coast hiking. Maybe even see ourselves some bears.

So I called my Cos in Seattle this afternoon to tell her about our plans, and somehow managed to convince her to join in for our little camping foray as well! So there you have it - this Friday will find a rather motley crew - Delta, my Cos, her Hubby, their Cherub, Hubby's Mum, their Dog, and me - all pitching tent (and opening a bottle or two of wine) at the base of Mt Rainier.
As much as I would love for a leisurely weekend of wilderness lethargy, our plans have transpired into a rather more active story. Early Saturday morning, Delta and I will set forth on the Wonderland Trail, which encircles Mt Rainier. Here's more or less how it'll go. We'll stagger ten miles along the trail, up and down the mountainside, munching trail mix along the way. We'll try desperately hard not to get eaten by bears or cougars, but no promises there, it might well be out of our control. We'll exhaustedly set up camp at dusk, cook ourselves a meager meal of noodles, comment on how noodles have never tasted better in our lives, and crash into a dead person's sleep. Only to wake up early on Sunday morning and repeat the routine again.

That, my friends, alarming as it might sound, is exactly why I am beside myself with excitement right now.

In our own backyard

We have spent a silly amount of money and time trying to appease Queen Jaffa with ridiculous cat toys - all kinds of scratching boards and plastic mice with randomly protruding feathers. All kinds of sparkling strings and rattles and widgets on wheels that scuttle across the floor. The only thing consistent in the whole process of courting QJ's attentions has been her disdainful boredom and our escalating desperation.

Then a few days ago, Delta crumpled a waste sheet of paper into a ball and threw it towards the bin, when QJ's head suddenly perked up. Crouching low and tensing her entire body, she pounced on the ball as though it were a mortal enemy. Amused, we tried to kick the ball away, but QJ was having none of it. She chased and bounded and pounced and clawed - all of a sudden, she had adopted the paper ball as her much-quested toy.

So we tied the balled paper to a piece of drawstring pulled out from Delta's boardshorts, and there you had it, the perfect cat toy. Through no effort or credit of our own, QJ had found for herself her own little enemy to stalk, pounce and play with.

And seriously, play with it she does, in much of her waking hours. Who woulda thunk a little ball of paper would have done the trick. They never told me that in the pet stores, that's for sure.

The World Cup positiveness

I love the World Cup. I love the idea of an event that brings the world together in a microcosm of positive, healty competitiveness. Just like the Olympics.

But other than admiring the overarching notion of grandeur it entails, I find the actual act of taking a more participative role in the World Cup rather tedious. Because let's face it, soccer is just a little bit boring to watch. The most redeeming feature by far is how each player has four shadows, which makes for a some quite distractingly pleasing on-screen graphics.

But I'll be darned if I can tolerate those freakin' trumpets for more than a few minutes before it drives me batty.

Nope. It took about five minutes of watching the US-UK game to get over my feeling of worldly goodwill, and urge Delta to change the channel back. It's true beauty lies in admiring from afar.

A recap month

A month has gone me by, a dormant time on the blog. The sun has shone, the sky has blued, and the world outside has beckoned. It's been an active month in the McDelta household - a month brimming with biking, hiking and tennis. A lot has transpired during this blogatorium, and it seems almost remiss to relegate each memory to a mere line or two. But there you go, such is the nature of the catch-up post following a dormant month on the blog.

Much to our excitement, Delta and I finally procured ourselves our tennis permits for the summer. In a seemingly ridiculous move, tennis permits in the city are available at only two locations - Paragon Sports, and Central Park. And yet, despite how regularly we frequent each, it seems even more ludicrous but it still took us two months to get around to actually procuring our own permits for the summer. But finally, here we are, permits in hand. A whole summer of potential has opened itself before us, and excitement abounds.

And just as our action meter kicked it up a notch, Rohinton and Jeet came to visit last weekend. It was lovely as ever to see them and hear about how happily they had settled into their new home in Bermuda. Delta and I had been hoping to visit them in Bermuda in a couple weeks, but as it turned out, the whole US Citizenship thing has taken longer than I'd anticipated, and I won't have my papers in time. Perhaps August or September now.

Speaking of my US Citizenship, I didn't hear from the USCIS in the longest time after my interview. For the first few weeks, it seemed normal. In about the fourth week, a nagging doubt arose in my mind. What if I hadn't passed that interview at all? What if they had forgotten to update my status in the administrative systems? What if their letter had gotten lost in the mail? And then one of my colleagues told me a story she had read in her local newspaper about a mail man who had been arrested for hoarding bags of undelivered mail for twenty years. And the nagging doubt in the back of my mind instantly flared into outright panic. What if my letter was being hoarded in a mailman's house even right now? When I entered the fifth week of my waiting period, I could take it no longer, and I called the USCIS. After about ten minutes of combating the phone system, ("press 1 for..., press 6 for..."), I reached a recorded message telling me that I should not call unless my letter was delayed by at least eight weeks. So I hung up in discouragement, I still had three more weeks of waiting to go before the USCIS would listen to my concern.

But then, all of a sudden, I received my appointment letter in the mail last week. It lay there nestled in our pile of catalogs and junk mail, glowing with a halo of brightness and purity. I ripped it open in my excitement: July 2. On July 2, folks, I go in for my swearing in ceremony to take the oath of americanism, pizza, apple pie, and all.

I'm sure the day will be upon us before we know it. But there's still a fair amount to keep us occupied between now and then. Next week, I go to Seattle for work. Instead of catching the Thursday night red-eye back as I normally do, Delta will be flying out there to come visit me instead, and we're going to try our hand hiking and camping for a couple nights around Mt Rainier. Finally, after a few urban weeks of tennis and biking, we'll be back out in the mountains again! The week after that, we're taking part in a challenging fifty mile bike ride in Long Island.

There's no denying it, the summer is fully here!

Travelling expertise

Every once in a while, I am jolted to exude a burst of energetic efficiency from my life of otherwise general complacency. It's when I'm confronted with an airport security checkpoint.

All of sudden, I'm a veritable blur of motion: out come laptop, toileteries, shoes and bags; breeze through the metal detector; in go laptop, toileteries, shoes and bags - all this, in probably less than a minute. Whatever I might be in my normal life, I'm not a faffer arounder at the airport. At the airport, I'm military.

So when catching my flight from Chicago this afternoon, I specifically chose the "Expert Traveller" security queue. Of course, the "Expert" designation just means no families with kids, and that you're supposed to generally know what you're doing. It's not like being knighted, it's not meant to get to your head.

So I was particlarly put off when the guy in front of me turned to me in irritation.

"Can you see these other people in the line?!" he exclaimed, "there's no way they're experts. There's no way they should be in this line."

They looked like perfectly normal travelers to me, so I just smiled politely but kept silent. I put on my conversation discouraging face. But he was far from being discouraged.

"I mean, look at them!" he turned to me again. "That woman totally messed up taking off her shoes in time. There's no way she should be allowed in this line. I hate people like that!"

Asswipe, I thought. There's always one of those on each flight I suppose.

So you can imagine, I was particularly gratified when the fellow walked through the metal detector and it went off.

"I'm sorry sir but you're going to have to take your watch off" the TSA guard reminded him politely.

He turned bright red as he walked back to place his watch on the x-ray conveyor.

Walked back to walk through the metal detector, and the thing went off again. I almost laughed out loud.

"I'm sorry sir but I think it might be your sunglasses" the TSA guard told him with the unlimited patience that you must inevitably develop in that job.

And so he had to walk back again, by now creating a backlog of people behind him, face flushed an unhealthy colour of purple. And the airport security queue can be a pretty unforgiving place to bungle.

"Hey move on already!" someone behind me muttered, but loud enough for us all to hear.

Boy, these "expert travellers" sure are a breed of their own.

I know, I know, it's a mighty petty quality to feel such glee from another person's misfortunes. But this one time, I was pretty happy the chap got his face rubbed in it.

Bellyaching

For the past three days, I've been suffering a distinct pain in my abdomen.

Not the sort of pain that comes from ingesting lettuce inhabited by e.coli. No, I know that kind of pain intimately, and could identify it precisely down to the specific ingredient.

No, the kind of pain I have is of a dull, throbbing sort. A somewhat more nether pain, pulsing in the grey matter that exists between my ribs and my hips.

Caused by a ruptured spleen, maybe. Or an abdominal tumour. Or (and I shudder to say it), just excessive overeating. Chronically excessive overeating.

Is it too much to ask, for quality news?

I have a deep and hankering revulsion for CNN's Rick Sanchez, and although I hate for my blog to be a rancorous one, this time I geniunely feel compelled to spill the beans.

And if I were to put it into context, it's not really Rick that I hate. It's what he repesents. Everything about someone like him decries the downfall of true journalism: using twitter as a valid news source; the conversion of fact into melodrama; and most of all, the sheer recklessness of inaccurate information.

Delta and I watched him on live tv, pointing at the Galapagos Islands on a map and calling it Hawaii. A couple weeks later we watched him pull the dogtrick again, this time confusing Madagascar with the Maldives.

I find it absolutely dispiriting that someone like this, with no concept of geography, would be qualified to deliver the news. To have his own daily show on CNN!

I had almost recovered from these heartaches, and would have been happy to leave bygones as bygones, when he pulled another gaff yesterday by criticising the USCIS for something which turned out to be factually wrong. Again. And this irked me instantly - partly because he's just so frequently wrong, but also mostly because he criticised the USCIS. And you know how I hold them so dearly to my heart.

Maybe I'm just ticked off because every time he comes on, I'm compelled to change the channel (don't want his viewer ratings look any higher, even inadvertently). Which means I have to scrounge around for the remote every afternoon when he comes on, which is pain in its own right.

I regard with great sadness the decline of journalism as an industry. Of course there are still great journalists, driving the forefront of true, investigative reporting. But increasingly, the Amanpours of the world are fewer, and further between. But let's face it - more often than not, we're lumped with the Rick's of the media.

Although frankly, this isn't about Rick, as it is about us. What has our world come to, that we find it acceptable to receive news at such levels of incompetence? What does this say about ourselves? It hurts my head that we have resigned ourselves to this standard of ineptitude.

Sometimes the bridesmaid, sometimes the bride

Every year, Delta and I have participated in the Five Boro Bike Ride. It's an organised 45-mile bike ride around New York City, and some 35,000 folks from all over the country particpate each year. Basically, a good ol' bike fest.

Unfortunately this year, we forgot to register by the deadline, and so couldn't paricipate in our beloved ride. Worse yet, we had no one to blame but our own decrepitude, which is of course an inconvenient position to be in.

We'd just started settling comfortably in a morose sulk, when right then we stumbled upon a fun Global Mosaic project hosted by Lens, the photography blog of the New York Times. It was a challenge to people all over the world, to take a picture of wherever they were in the world, at exactly the same moment: 15.00 hrs GMT on Sunday, May 2.

Irony of ironies, that moment in time was exactly in the middle of the Five Boro Bike Ride in NYC. So Delta and I got to participate in the event after all, if not as bikers then at least as photographers.

You know how it goes. Sometimes the bridesmaid, sometimes the bride.