Merry Christmas !! (it's still the 25th here on the Left Coast)

What a great Christmas! I'm actually glad United screwed up, it forced me to get to Seattle early, and I spent the day with family. One of the best I can remember.

Here's a little Christmas card for one and all (look behind the pine trees for the skeletons), I hope it was a merry day for all reading this!

I got a nice Christmas gift compliments of Delta to start the day. United really messed up my ticket, and it took 45 minutes to get things straightened out. By the time they did, the flight to Seattle was filled – in coach. I was willing to use miles to upgrade, but some dumb airline rule said I couldn’t since it counted as a code share. So, the nice guy at the SB airport gave me a free 1st class ticket, with a hearty “Merry Christmas!”

On the flight, we had an incident where someone passed out walking up to the rest room. The flight attendants asked if there were any MDs on board, and 7 folks came walking forward (surprisingly all from coach). Six of them were women. Yeah girl power!!
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ANTARCTICA FUN FACTS -- Australian researchers have shown than a ground-based telescope in Antarctica can take images almost as good as those from the Hubble Space Telescope, at a fraction of the cost. "It represents arguably the most dramatic breakthrough in the potential for ground-based optical astronomy since the invention of the telescope," says University of New South Wales Associate Professor Michael Ashley, who co-authored a paper in the journal Nature. "The discovery means that a telescope at Dome C on the Antarctic plateau could compete with a telescope two to three times larger at the best mid-latitude observatories, with major cost-saving implications. (Source: EurekAlert!)