Here We Go Again

Well as all can see, I erased my old blog quite some time ago. Some already know the reasons why. For those not in the know, here is the story....

After finishing a trip in Detroit last fall, I plopped myself down in the aisle seat of an airplane to go home to Minneapolis, and as the rest of the passengers boarded, I sat wondering which very large or smelly person would sit next to me this time. As luck would have it, this time a very nice girl my age sits next to me and we strike up a conversation and chat for the entire flight home. She very slyly gives me her phone number at the end of the flight, and with a smile on my face I head to my car to drive home. That weekend I give her a call and we plan to do something the following Friday after I am home from another trip in Detroit. Fast forward to the middle of the next week: I receive an email from Ben asking if I had been on my blog lately and saying that I really need to check out my blog's sitemeter. A sitemeter allows a blogger to see the details of his/her visitors: the number of page views, the time spent on pages, and important here, the host of the visitors' internet connections. Not many people read my blog, but that week there had been a visitor who spent several hours reading the pages of my blog and the visitor's internet host was medtronic.com. Where did this girl work? Yes, Medtronic. According to Ben's sleuthing, she was doing her homework for our date Friday, decided to google me (not sure how she found my last name because I never told her), found me listed on Jude's site, preceeded to read Jude's site, then linked to my site, proceeded to read my site, and also linked to Ben's site to read. And after all that reading I think she got a little scared. As we all know, our postings are often very sarcastic in nature (Ben, I am eyeing you right now), but sarcasm can be very hard to detect in written word.

Skip ahead now to Friday. She says she has to work late and can't do anything Friday. But she has tickets to the Gopher football game on Saturday so we go to it, and in conversation she brings up all these things that we have never talked about but were on the blogs. It was hilarious. You see, she didn't know that I knew that she knew. In the end, I don't think we were very much alike and said our farewells. And for anyone wanting to know, first dates at football games are bad--the final score was like 63 to 30-something, so a smooth conversation about anything was difficult......it went something like this "So you are a big runner, huh (we had never talked about running before, but google me and all sorts of Mac race results appear)?" "Yeah, I ran the......oh oh oh TOUCHDOWN!" (wait several minutes for excitement to subside) "Yeah, I ran the Twin Cities Marathon a couple months ago." "Wow, oh wow........TOUCHDOWN!" (wait again). "So where have you.......holy crap look at that TOUCHDOWN!" (more minutes pass with everyone in jubilation). Anyway, you see the trend.

I also was thinking I might have a few new job interviews coming up so I decided if the potential employer decided to google me as well----well, I wouldn't want the interview to go the same way as the date.

So I'm back on here and I plan to post about some of the trips I have taken in the past, maybe writing a bit of a travelogue and posting some pictures. Nothing sarcastic. Nothing "out there" that might return to bite me in the ass. I am in Detroit on-call for 5 days...today is day 4 and I haven't been called once. Time is on my hands, folks. Look for more posts over the next few weeks.