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Airlines keep cutting costs much to my dismay
For vacation, my wife and I went to Hawaii (the Big Island of Hawaii) and, of course, took a plane there. Due to when we travelled and booked the flight, our tickets were not cheap, in fact, they were the most expensive tickets I've ever purchased. While the cost kind of stung, it was the corners that the airlines are cutting that annoy me. We packed a pretty big bag as I travel with a lot of junk and we never thought about its weight until a few hours before we left when I checked American Airline's website and found that the weight limit decreased from 70 pounds to 50 pounds per piece of checked luggage. For $25, you could have a 51-75 pound bag or for $50, a 67-100 pound bag. We moved some stuff to another bag and when we got to the airport, it weighed in at 49.5 pounds! On the way back, we got by at exactly 50 pounds. This change in weight limits can't have anything to do with fuel costs and must be associated with greed, in my opinion. We are each allowed 2 checked bags at 50 pounds each and 1 carry-on at 30 pounds. So, we could have packed 260 pounds of stuff (now that's a lot of stuff). Instead, we went with 1 checked bag at 50 pounds and 1 carry on at < 30 pounds. If we had stuffed our checked bag, we would have paid extra, but if we took another bag, we could have had an extra 50 pounds of stuff to bring. Does the extra $25 cover worker's compensation insurance for those lifting the bags? I did see a suitcase with a built in scale on a website recently; must be to avoid the extra fees.
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Too hot or too cool
I'm a fair weather kind of person; I'm happier when it is sunny and warm. Lately this has started to change a little bit (not the sunny part, the warm part). Since getting back from vacation, I've gone on 3 training runs where it has been over 70 degrees out. I'm not sure if it is that I haven't trained in a week (I went on 1 out of 4 runs while on vacation), but my performance was pretty poor. Yesterday's run, I had over a 9 minute mile which isn't the norm for me. I think I need to get up at the crack of dawn (when my wife leaves for work) and run then otherwise training is going to be a nightmare as the temperature increases.
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Can there be an ideal car?
There are lots of features I like about what I drive, a Toyota Highlander. However, we rented a Chevy Malibu on our vacation and it has a few features that I think are lacking from my car, but at the same time, lacks many features that I have. I'd like to see a combination of features from both cars as well as some others in my next car. I'm sure that if I bought a real expensive car, I'd get them. For instance, I want:
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Breathing, part 2
The other day, I wrote about taking breathing for granted; the story doesn't end there. My wife decided to book us on a tour of Mauna Kea. I said, "whatever" as I usually do when she wants to book something. It wasn't until the night before that I looked at the tour website and got a little panicked as there are numerous warnings about the high altitude and the inability for rapid emergency response in case something happened. We made it to 9200 ft and I was still breathing without difficulty. Then we climbed to over 13000 ft where I was still able to breath, but felt a little light headed. You really don't think about breathing until it becomes difficult.