San Francisco--pregame

It's ten of ten, eastern standard time, and ten of seven pacific time. I'm in an ex0pens8ven hotel which strangely doesn't have a television, waiting for the time we have to get together with group for the trip. I slept ten hours (including a couple pretending to sleep around two local time). I would have done this earlier, but I wasn't able to figure out specifically how to log on to the hotel's wai fi. (I sort of did, but it cut out.)

First I want to talk about United Air lines. I 've flown a couple of times this year, but not on them and they've had some bizarre and disturbing innovations. Like , charging for food and having free movies, and not the other way around as it traditoinal, and charging fifty bucks for extra seating and then, as in the case of the guy sitting next to me, not giving them it.

The big problem getting here was not the flight, or the fact that I was stuck in the middle for both legs of it (we had a stop in Denver), but getting to LaGuardia airport. The best shortcut is to take the R or W trains to Astoria blvd, and then get on the M60, something I've done lots of time, but this time the W was completely cancelled and the R was stuck underneith the East River. Only they didin't tell us this and the R I was on stopped at 57th street and we were told that that was the last stop. The only way to get to Queens was to head back to 34th street and get the F. Shit!!!

I was running late, so I figured I'd go to 42nd and take the shuttle to Grand Central and then take the bus to the airport, The Shuttle wasn't working for some reason and when I ran to GC, I discovered I had missed the bus by scant minutes, and the next one wouldn't have arrived until ten minutes before talkoff. So I had to blow $20 on a taxi...24, I forgot the fact that he charged me for the tolll under the river.

Getting from the airport to the hotel cost almost as much, but that was really easy as I had planned to do that from the getgo. The hotel is very nice, having a free wine-tasting (where I blew my alchohol quota for the month) and had a very good time discussing politics with a lobbyist. The polls look very good. The National Review website has the Democrats getting a 24 seat majority in the house and a tie in the senate. That should be cool, and we should probably do somewhat better. There only being eight days to go...more when we get to PIXAR.