13 January 2007 39 views No Comment Print This Post

I get to go on a on a working-vacation with my wife to Costa Rica with one of her customers and a bunch of his customers and friends. Everyone is from the Cincinnati Ohio/Covington Kentucky area so we flew to Cincinnati first and then to Atlanta and on to Costa Rica.

This morning, we were at the Cincinnati area airport scrounging for food and coffee and last minute stuff like books for the flight. My wife went looking for some coffee and egg muffins and I went to the bookstore.

I picked up a copy of Freakonomics, revised and expanded edition. It’s by two guys, one is a maverick economist, who look at things like the value of parenting, why crack dealers don’t have their own homes and whether your real estate agent is really out to get you the best deal. I’ve been hearing a lot about it and after reading about 20-25% on the plane, I’m eager to read more. It’s written in a neat casual, almost college class kind of way without the formulas and number crunching. Instead of presenting statistic after statistic and formula after formula they explain how they looked at information and teased out bits to find the real correlations between things like going to a good school and getting good grades vs. being poor and getting good grades. It’s interesting stuff, and not all of it is easy to accept once you become aware of their conclusions. But they also discuss the difference between correlation and causal relationships, and the difference between correlation and conventional wisdom.

So, I got my book and I went to the gate area to accept a much anticipated coffee from my wife. She was talking to her customer, Mark, and we started exchanging conversation about their last trip to our home state of Maine. I raised my coffee up to take a sip and I kept tipping and tipping the cup, waiting for that scalding hot contact on my lip. But it seemed like the cup wasn’t full. I tipped and sucked at the cup and then my stomach started to burn. The lid on the cup was open on the sipping side. I was pouring coffee down my shirt and pants and it soaked through and burned my middle-aged tire.

Mark looked at the streak of brown still steaming my frontside and said, “That sucks.” He was right.

But, I had one of those spf 35 North Face travel shirts on. It’s kind of light, but keeps it’s shape and looks nice even if you’ve worn it all day. I couldn’t bear the idea of wearing this stinking coffee shirt on the plane for three hours so I went to the mens room took it off and rinsed it under cold water in the sink just to try to get the coffee out. Then I dried it under the hand dryer; all in like 5 minutes. The shirt looked great!

I also had some North Face pants on that are pretty light. I have had them for years and wear them for everything. They have a hidden pockets behind both front pockets that help hold bills and flat stuff. They have stretchy inner cuffs to keep critters from crawling up your leg. I decided not to take them off and rinse out the coffee, since they are brown and it’s barely visible. But, I bet it would have worked.

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