“You seem to consider the [Supreme Court] judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions; a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy.”
― Thomas Jefferson
Doing my best this morning to avoid the arrogant, divisive bits of revanchist jurisprudence trickling out of our Highest Court last week. But I'll probably wander back there anyway at some point.
Friday I bolted from the office as soon as my mediation ended, bound for the plane and my first night at Tara in a month, and as usual in the summer acne splatter of thunderstorms across the southeast led to an aggressive re-routing in the Mighty Columbia. I took off out of ECP and immediately banked right and through a hole between strong rain showers, then instead of following the straight magenta line on the map that led across the Carolinas and the Shenandoah Valley to ELM, I snaked up past Lookout Mountain, Oak Ridge, and finally found some clear air in the last hour of my flight into Huntington, West Virginia. I stayed on the ground there just long enough to refuel and pee, then was off again for the 1 + 50 back home. It was just going dark as I rolled onto final approach, and as I removed my sunglasses I realized my glasses were nowhere to be found, leaving me to shoot an approach in what looked like a bad impressionist painting of an airport at night.
Saturday was to be a fun, rewarding experience--Peg and I drove to Rochester to turn the accumulations of her and my months of very hard work into a replacement for the Ridgeline. Neither of us have ever been wild about that weird little truck, all tinny and loud, but we've shared some great adventures driving it over the last couple years. But there's a time and place for everything, and it was time for P to drive something a little more stylish.
The trip up to Rochester was gorgeous, sunny and warm, and we talked along the way about how wonderful we found upstate New York.
Then we had the experience of buying a car there, and the downsides of the nanny state began to ooze to the surface.
Peg quickly concluded the car we were there to test drive, a new 250 GLB, wasn't her cup of chowder. Too plain, odd trim, odd wheels. But that 250 GLB in the showroom, blue with mocha leather seats and every possible option, well, that's the machine. So we bought it.
Trading the Ridgeline was a snap, it wasn't even noon, and we were paying cash. Easy peasy, right?
Well, not exactly. New York requires proof of insurance on the vehicle before it leaves the lot, even if it's a cash sale. We called USAA and had them send an email confirming coverage that day, but the actual insurance card showed the next day. The dealer needed a card that showed Saturday as the effective date. We called USAA, but the benighted customer service rep couldn't figure out how to fix the problem. "I'm sorry, sir, our insurance cards always show the next day. But you have insurance."
We demanded a supervisor, who came on the line and was every bit as clueless as his minion. The poor salesman kept insisting that the fact that we had insurance, and it was confirmed in writing, would not satisfy the bureaucratic drones in Albany. We needed that insurance card.
Hours went by. Peg kept saying, "I'm done with this." The USAA supervisor sat on the phone with me as he fumbled with manually filling in fields on his computer, seemingly unable to complete the task as he babbled in stream of consciousness over the phone.
Finally, I told Joe the salesman, "Well, I guess we just aren't going to buy a car today."
At that point his supervisor, a dapper little former Navy corpsman in white buck shoes, came around the corner and informed us that they'd decided they could take the proof of insurance after all.
We'd been there four hours. Peg got her car, and a free sweatshirt with a Mercedes logo she vowed never to wear.
From the dealership we drove to the Rochester Yacht Club, where they sat us outside with a glass of wine and a couple appetizers as we gradually regained our sense of humor. We had planned to go look at a used sailboat down the road in Sodus Point, a sleepy little village on Lake Ontario. But now it was after five, and the salesman lived in Texas and didn't want to tell us where to find the boat for fear we'd cut him out of the deal. Finally he relented, and we drove an unlovely stretch of highway through miles of light industrial shops until we left the main road, wandered through spectacular farmland on a plateau above the lake, and meandered around tiny Sodus Point in search of our boat.
It took a while, but finally we found it, a 33 foot Pearson on the hard.
She seemed in good shape, and a scruffy sailor out walking his daughter's dog struck up a conversation with us about how we might get it down to Seneca Lake. The owners had torn out her awful and dangerous gasoline engine and replaced it with an electric motor. All well and good, but we'd likely lack the range to make it through the series of locks and canals we'd have to traverse to reach Watkins Glen where the Naiad would live in the summer. So now we're pondering on all that.
Yesterday we threw some clothes in a suitcase and were back at the plane for the long journey south, taking Peg to a locums assignment down in Key West. The first leg to Savannah was uneventful, but by the time we landed there the weather over the lower peninsula had become very bad indeed. I flight-planned a route that would snake us down the middle of the state and bring us into KEYW from the east, which seemed to avoid the worst of it, but as we approached Lakeland we were faced with a wall of thunderstorms that stretched all the way from Sarasota to Vero. I reached over and tightened Peg's seat belt as I pondered what to do next.
The radar showed the storms ending right at the shoreline, then picking up again around Key West. I made a command decision to reroute us out over the Gulf and along the coastline, keeping the storms just off our left wing. Soon I noticed on our traffic monitoring system a whole posse of corporate jets, airliners, and poor schlubs like myself all doing the same thing. Maybe twenty minutes from our arrival we faced yet another wall of severe weather between us and our destination, but it was also our good fortune to switch over to the air traffic controllers at the Navy base at Boca Chica Key, well-known among pilots for being very, very good at dealing with the fickle weather down here. They helped me pick through the crud with relative ease, and soon we were on the deck in muggy Key West.
After a big Italian supper at La Trattoria, a tradition for P on her first night here over the years, we figured on sleeping the sleep of the dead following an eventful weekend. It started out that way, but this is Key West, a bird sanctuary where chickens and roosters roam the streets. At 3 a.m. a rooster across the street from our room here at the Casa Marina decided not to wait for the dusk to begin crowing every minute or so, which he did for three hours until Peg left to go to work at 6.
Now I'm ready for a nap at 9 a.m., despite the triple shot latte I bought downstairs from lovely Natalia the Ukrainian, but my first conference call is in about an hour, and I need to get ready for a Zoom hearing later today. Avgas at the Key West FBO is over $10 a gallon, and a glass of bad wine in this place is $25--we've got to pay for all this leisure.
I managed to get through this little essay without ranting about the Supremes. Maybe tomorrow. This morning my BP was a remarkable 120/80. Thinking calm thoughts.
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