Ozone Park, Queens

The whole world seems to pass through this aptly named little Queens neighborhood that huddles in the shadow of thundering jets. Ten minutes from JFK International Airport, it becomes an overnight stop for people from France, Guatemala, Florida, nearly every state in the nation.

Our flight from Ft. Myers arrived at JFK just as most places in our hotel's neighborhood were closing for the night.  Even though we'd been snacking all along, the very idea of not having access to any more food made us suddenly ravenous. Anticipating this kind of desperation, I had walked the little yellow GoogleMaps man around the area before we got here and knew the neighborhood rather well. CJ's Bar & Lounge, I now knew, was open late.  After dropping off the bags, we made our way there with hope in our hearts.

This is a good old New York neighborhood pub with a diverse crew of young Hispanic males in hoodies, older Italian gents who live around the corner and come here every night, a handful of (well, okay, two) young women with streaked hair, and travelers through JFK, like us. Monday Night Football was in full-throated roar, the crowd rooting for Seattle against the Redskins, and a crew in the corner were slamming down dominos and shot glasses with equal enthusiasm.

Lucky for us, it was 25-cent wing night, too. I guess we've gotten too accustomed to our puny, 35-cent Florida wings. These New York chickens must be the size of small geese.

In a fit of abandon, we also ordered the chili cheese fries, which proved to be a soggy pile of glop.  But at midnight, after a long day traveling, one becomes none too picky.

With Halloween coming, they've draped the entire building with a gigantic web, complete with mammoth spiders.  When we came outside, a guy on the sidewalk deadpanned, "Bug problem."

Mercury retrograde

I’ve always held a guarded belief in astrology, the influence of the planets and stars on our lives. 

Mercury, for example, rules intelligence, mind, memory, and all types of communication from talking and texting to writing. It also rules commerce, computers, telephones, transportation, and, um, air travel.  Mercury in particular can have a weird effect on all of us for several three-week spans during the year.  During these intervals, the fleet-footed red planet uncharacteristically slows down and appears to stop and move backwards, in a kind of cosmic optical illusion called Mercury retrograde.

During Mercury retrograde, communications and travel of all kinds go kerflooey.  Misunderstandings and arguments run rampant.  Communications in general fail.  If you don’t know ahead of time about Mercury retrograde, you wonder why your computer has gone on the fritz, your cell phone isn’t working properly, and everything in general seems to be going wrong.  Simple.  It’s the great Murphy’s Law of the universe: Mercury has gone retrograde. 

Mercury is retrograde this October, from the 4^th through the 25^th. Right now, in other words.



Larry Schwimmer of the Huffington Post regularly writes a column about the Top 10 Things Not to Do When Mercury Is Retrograde.  Among them:

Don't Accept or Start a Job. If you do, you may regret it. I had one client disregard that advice. She accepted a new job and by the time she started the month after, when Mercury went direct, the company had changed her job so much that it no longer resembled the one that she had accepted. Her reporting relationship had also totally shifted from the great guy she was going to work for to the loudmouth, chauvinistic boss from hell! During Mercury retrograde, things are not what they seem to be.

What makes this Larry Schwimmer dude so smart?  I ask you, why should people have to check with Mercury before starting or stopping a job? Note that October 4^th was the first day of the rest of my life, at which point I began a retirement during which I planned to freelance for my former employer.  Note, too, that I planned obsessively and scrupulously for a new email address and access to the company's systems, to go into effect October 4^th.  Right.  Neither the new email address nor the systems access works.

We leave on our world travels today.  What would wiseguy Larry Schwimmer say?

Avoid Traveling A Lot. If you can't put certain trips on hold, just be aware that you can expect an unusual amount of last-minute flight cancellations, meeting postponements and long transportation delays. Allow extra time when traveling; make sure your bags are very secure. Take extra precautions, because during this time they may be more likely to be lost or stolen. Re-confirm your reservations, appointments and addresses for your meetings, as delays and cancellations can be expected.

Bill doesn’t believe in Mercury retrograde.  As usual, I’m trying to remain optimistic. Hey, the passports and visas came back, didn't they?

The eleventh hour

Two weeks from now, God willing, we will be in Reykjavik. Stopper that volcano for just a fortnight, will you please, senior deity? 

And ensure a few other things as well, please, while you're at it?

I guess two weeks isn't exactly the eleventh hour. But today we had to get serious about our tourist visas for Thailand.

A visa is required if one remains in Thailand longer than 30 days, as is an accounting of one's comings and goings, as well as every time one has been in Thailand before. (Why should that matter?)  We will be there precisely 31 days and will enter the kingdom twice, so Bill feared that, even if the Thai government let this go, the airlines might not, and we would be stuck forever in Singapore en route home. Although this might be fun, it really wouldn't do.

Turns out the nearest Thai consulate, in Miami, is closed for the entire month of September--rather like some Thai restaurants we know.  So, we have had to resort to a special Visa Express expediting service, whose website contains a great deal of text reading "Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s."

Being an editor and understanding the half-assed nature of "Lorem Ipsum," all this made me a bit nervous.

Nevertheless, Visa Express was recommended by the Thai consulate and happily accepted our payment of over $300 for their service.

No worries.

We discovered that we also had to have two additional passport photos taken apiece, to send off with our applications. Off we went to AAA headquarters, where this can be done relatively efficiently.  Still, I was by now so grumpy that I didn't bother to put on makeup and was perversely pleased to see that my photo looked like holy hell. The Thai government and the airlines will know how I feel about this, goddammit!

Now, the kicker. We are required to send off our passports with our photos, applications, and bank statement proving that we really have the money to pay for all this. 

Will our travel insurance cover not getting our passports back in time, and the bank account being drained?

Should I call in a consumer advocate?

Serenity now ...

End of an era

I looked up from my computer, stunned.  “You booked us to leave three days after I retire??”  

Never shy about taking action, Bill had set our three-month world tour to begin a weekend away from my last day of working life, after 45 years on the job.

I thought at first it must be a mistake.  “Oopsie, I did that?” he’d say.  Now, I’m sure he did it on purpose, and with wisdom.  Like throwing a kid off the dock in the firm belief that it will swim.  Why dilly-dally?

Why should this unsettle me? 

I’ve been in college textbook publishing since 1970, two-thirds of my life ago. This is long enough to have attended outlandishly costly dinners, schmoozing tipsily with authors and senior editors in Chicago, Atlanta, New Orleans, San Francisco, New York, Miami.   Picture Mad Men, just a couple years later.  These were the good old days before textbooks were dying, when one could still smoke in one’s office, order plural bottles of costly wine for the table, wax wildly creative, put on a sound-and-light show to present a new book at a sales conference. "We shall be both dog and pony."