Fields From The Sky

So there’s this theory that you actually need to blog on a daily basis to get into the habit, and while I do that for work, it’s not so easy around these parts. I get ideas for posts, but then life/work/everything else gets in the way and I have to decide if it’s worth staying up another half an hour at 4am to do a post or actually getting to bed before the sun starts rising, and the pillow usually wins out. Of course, I keep collecting all these ideas for posts (and, yes, I’d said I was going to do a series of music posts, but that’s gotta wait a bit).

Anyway, I was going to do a post on my travel schedule lately. Back in business school I thought that the students who wanted to go into consulting were nuts, after hearing about the hours and the amount of traveling. Of course, as fate would have it, these days I’m willing to bet I put in more hours than most of the folks who went into consulting — and I haven’t taken an actual full vacation in… well… forever.

And, I was thinking it out recently and realized that I’ve actually been on an airplane at least once every month for at least the past 15 months — and the same will be true at least through July and possibly beyond that. Of course, it’s not quite as bad as it seems. For some weird reason, my travel schedule almost always has me flying somewhere at the end of a month and flying back at the beginning of the next month. So I flew at the end of November and back at the beginning of December, then again at the end of January and back at the beginning of February… and then again at the end of March and back at the beginning of April. Of course, then I had 3 more flights in April, so I sorta killed it there. July is now looking like it may involve something on the order of 7 to 8 flights, but at least some of them will not have a damn thing to do with work for once.

Of course, you’d think with all this travel I’d have stacked up some pretty nice frequent flier mileage, but you’d be wrong. Not sure how that’s happened, but I’ve never been able to redeem miles for anything. Part of the problem is JetBlue. For all the wonders of JetBlue, your points only last 12 months — and even I’m not flying fast enough to stack them up. When I booked my latest JetBlue flight, I learned that they (like every other airline) have a credit card, and points you earn with it last forever, but I really have no desire to get another credit card, so I’ll just suffer along.

Anyway, the point of this post before it went off on a tangent was that I actually enjoy flying. I’ve always enjoyed looking at maps and stuff, and staring out the window while flying, figuring out where we are and seeing what everything looks like from the sky really is still a joy. When Google Earth first came out and gave you nearly the same sensation, I was thrilled. However, I’ve found myself doing one odd thing while taking off and landing in metropolitan regions: I start spotting baseball fields.

I don’t know why, but it just amazes me how many baseball fields there are, even in densely packed areas. In some cases, it must represent a ton of valuable real estate if it were turned into housing, but we’ve decided that the tradeoff is absolutely worthwhile. Given my ongoing obsession with baseball, I’m certainly not going to disagree. However, you have to wonder what someone who has no idea what baseball is would think flying over one of these areas and spotting all these odd fields with dirt diamonds over to one side.

Yeah, I go a month without posting and this is the best I can come up with… I keep hearing random friends/relatives/acquaintences tell me they’ve discovered this blog (not that it was ever hidden, but I never told anyone about it either), so maybe this is my attempt to bore you all away, so I can go back to blogging in obscurity.