Cool Gasps Like Cat's Breath

I am stuck in traffic.  Just about the most banal sentence I can think of to begin a dutiful entry.  The perennial default: arrested in the civic veins once again.  And now is when I reach for my bag and pull out my laptop.  Flip it open, pull up a blank page, look around and sigh.  If one isn’t digging very deep, if one isn’t pulling up much from out the well, just look outside. 

We crawled for twenty minutes just now in the sun, on the airport express way.    I promptly fell asleep with my hand on the space bar and woke up many pages below, another perennial observation.  We’ve a new peak on the year’s Fahrenheit waxing today.  You can feel it.  You ask one of these older cabs to turn on the air conditioning and they will, of course.  But then you’d better be riding for the next thirty minutes, as it will take that long for any of the air in the back of the cab to become conditioned.  Faint cool gasps like cat's breath hint at what’s it like up there in the front, near the tired old vents. 

Tried to plan a trip home of the summer.  There are many different pieces and so there is no point nailing down one until you’re sure about a few of the others.  Had a call with a cycle tour operating company in France.  Fortunately the lady on the other end wound up being Canadian and it was easy to determine most of what I needed.   And so if that is something we may do, then why don’t I call United to see if there are any flights I can get for free with miles.

United has one class of ticket that lets you use miles to buy a ticket just about any time, anywhere.  But a ticket wipes out whatever points you’ve built for last year.  The other type (I refuse to look it up and confirm the proper marketing jargon) gets you essentially two where you otherwise might have gotten one.  I checked to see about flights home from New York to Beijing, for three months out.  As expected, nothing was available. Then I asked her to just check to see about anything into Paris from Beijing.  “Yes, two, on precisely the day you wanted.” Nice.  “What about from Paris to New York ten days later?”  “Yes, three on precisely the day you wanted.”  I told this woman at United, who’s name I recall was Casey, that she just saved me about five-grand.  For all the times it doesn’t work, this was a fine conversation with my friends at United, and the happy residue wafted about my thinking for the next few hours.