BACK IN THE "BIG" CITY-PRAISE FOR SOUTHWEST AIRLINES

My sojourn to McMinnville is over and I'm back in Marina Del Rey CA. This is the first time in many years I've flown with Southwest, and I have to say they definitely get it right. At least for this trip. By paying a modest $10 fee each way, they automatically check you in which gives you a preferred position in line. I was number 22 coming back from Portland and got exactly the seat I love: Row 6 on the aisle. They don't charge for luggage---BTW today's L.A. Times reported that luggage fees now account for about $3.4 BILLION dollars a year.

I always look for non-stop flights, but this time I took one with stopovers in Oakland CA (don't get off the plane) in each direction Why? It was more than $200 cheaper than the competing airlines, and don't forget the lack of fees for luggage. These people have the efficiency of Disneyland when it comes to moving crowds. Within 25 minutes the Oakland passengers were off the plane, the Los Angeles ones on and we were in the air. We arrived in Los Angeles at 10:23 p.m.--7 minutes ahead of schedule. Kudos to Southwest!

This morning after setting up my laptop I realized the thing I missed the most while at my sister Phyllice's house was typing on a keyboard rather than directly on the laptop. Talk about frustration. I'm simply not used to using the keyboard on the laptop and the cursor kept jumping around creating some very unusual words like seboardtting-- see what I mean. Anyway, it's always good to go and good to come back, particularly when I'm able to come back with 30 outline pages of a fully plotted Silver Sisters mystery. We actually managed to stay on point despite gossip sessions, rerun episodes of Law and Order, Numbers and Bones, and the insanity of Phyllice's house with people coming and going. Yep. We have our plot.

When we are together, it always reinforces how much alike we are in some ways, even to the extent of events in our lives paralleling, and how different we are in other ways. As Phyllice sometimes puts it, she is the country mouse like Goldie Silver and I'm the city slicker like Godiva Olivia DuBois.

We also spent some time reminiscing about our Uncle Sol, the perennial youth. In his seventies, Uncle Sol was still going on 17 in spirit. He was the spot of sunshine in a day and could make generations of kids and adults laugh. Some of the humor in our books comes from his antics and we both agreed that as kids we didn't realize the gift he gave us of looking at situations with a positive eye, always infused with laughter. After my father died when Phyllice was 12 and I was 17, he was sort of a surrogate dad for several years. He used to call himself the voice of reason and that's what we gave the Silver Sisters' uncle Sterling Silver.

That's all for now.