Yo. Great weekend. Lively and interesting all around.

Last Wednesday, I flew out to St. Louis to meet up with a friend of mine. Trip out was really odd. I flew Northwest Airlines. At LaGuardia, we all get on the plane, and it is announced that twelve of us have to get off the plane because it was overloaded. So it became a waiting game, until twelve souls broke down and decided that they really didn't need to be wherever they were going that urgently. Northwest gave a $300 voucher for opting to stay behind. After that experience, a free trip on Northwest sure didn't get me to thinking. We were on the tarmac for about an hour and forty five minutes. Airlines are awful. Except jetBlue. I'm considering adopting a policy of not going anywhere jetBlue doesn't fly.

Coming home brought more drama. I changed planes in Detroit with a 1.5 hour layover. Time to kill. What to do. I headed for the exit and had a cigaret. This put me at the wrong side of the security screening. No big deal. I have to take off my boots every time I go through, but I'm used to that. Never had a problem until now, that is. As I'm approaching the metal detector thingy, I empty my pockets of anything metal into whatever bag I'm carrying. That way, I'm only wearing fabric and the problematic boots when I get to the nice folks with the wands. This time, in addition to taking off my boots, they asked if they could search my bag. Sure, go right ahead. Well, my butch chain wallet gave the security woman pause. She felt it could be used as a weapon. I mean, so could my belt. I could garrot someone with my shoelaces. Or my tee shirt if it came to it. So they told me I had to check my wallet. This meant that my bag had to be checked, because I wasn't about to just check my wallet. Y'know, I don't mind the enhanced vigilance in this the post 9/11 era, but could we please not have stupid people doing security? Is that too much to ask? Stupid people and power are such a bad combination. Always. Now, I've gone through security with my chain wallet nine times before this. Oh well.

Anyway, between the airline experiences, I had a blast. I spent a lot of time on the back of my friend's motorcycle. We went up the Mississippi on the Illinois side to Grafton, stopped and got fried fish and a few beers. Then visited a whipsman buddy of his in a wee little town in rural Ilinois. We saw fireworks. And we stopped by the City Museum . The place is amazing. The draw was that they had a smelter. How cool is that? "Hey, whadderwe gonna do for the fourth of july?" "I got an idea, let's get one of those smelter things."

The smelter was run by this total bohunkus from Devil's Night Iron Works. (Nothing came up for them when I googled.) He's a MFA scupture grad who's got this smelter and does this great iron work. Really cool stuff. And it's very performance art-y to watch them all working, hooting and hollering as they pour molten iron into sand molds. And we did get to Ted Drewes' for cements. And I spent time with my college friend, the Fertile One. (She and her husband are 'trying' now.) It's all good.

So then, Special Guy picked me up at the airport. We went to his parents' house in Queens so I could get something to eat. (In addition to all the aggravation, Northwest calls it quits after pretzel sticks.) We talked. I ate stew. We had watermelon in the back yard. And then I got in the car to head home, and the Special Guy leaned in, gave me a kiss, and said, "I love you, Sweetie."

"I love you, too" I croaked.

So begins a new chapter in my life. Gosh.

Tomorrow we're meeting up to have dinner and then have another sleepover so we can do some horizontal dancing. Same thing on Friday, followed by him coming to watch me play softball badly.

Life is good. Life is very good.