Interesting reading and not exactly off topic

["Maryanne Stroud Gabbani" <maryanne@ratbusters.net>]

Last June, Sharon Saare wrote to me to see if I would like to join her on a
trail riding holiday in Mexico this October. Sharon and I have become pretty
good friends over the last year or so...two old California girls of
approximately the same age....and I said it sounded great. I haven't had a
real vacation (ie, one that wasn't organised around a husband's business
trip or the wants/needs of children) for at least 10 years...except for my 3
days at the Pan Ams....and I figured that the chaos that was left over from
my husband's death almost 18 months ago in a plane crash should be pretty
much taken care of by then.  So I checked around and found that Diaa left me
a TON of frequent flyer miles, enough to travel in the relative luxury of
business class from Cairo to LA and back to Cairo via New York to see the
kids. I paid for the Mexico portion and made my reservation. It's all very
inflexible now and I'm working like mad to finish off important business
problems before I leave.

Then someone decided to blow up New York.

In all the ensuing concerns and discussions, I totally forgot about the
vacation until yesterday when the Lufthansa agent called me. Here, many ask
me if I'm crazy, going to the US at a time like this...especially the Los
Angeles area. My kids in Manhattan have had no problem, but some of the
Egyptian/Sudanese/other varieties of Arab kids who left home for university
in LA have come back saying that it was entirely too scary for them and
they'd rather go to school somewhere else. Well, I travel on a Canadian
passport and my brother will gather me up to zip up to Ojai for a few days
so LA isn't a problem for me.  The Mexican part should be wonderful. We are
riding in Michoacan,the volcanic western region, and I haven't been there
for over 30 years. The idea of 10 days of just hanging out with a bunch of
horse fogeys and riding sounds like heaven. Then I get to go to NYC to see
my kids and I know it's going to be a real shock. That sort of scares me. I
don't want to see a battered Manhattan. It's like seeing an old friend who's
been in a car accident or beaten up. I find I'm most anxious about that part
of the trip.

With all this flying and anxiety ahead of me, I opened my online New York
Times this morning (www.nytimes.com if you're interested) to find two
articles of real interest. One by Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard is a comment
in the op-ed section on the balance between good and evil in the
world...that one made me feel better. The other one was an article on how
the pilots in the airlines are questioning the arming of pilots and pointing
out that they and passengers on planes are less helpless than they have been
made to feel. As the wife of a pilot, I was cheered by the sense of
empowerment that the article endorsed. Guns have no place in an airplane. A
misplaced bullet at 35 thou feet can be a disaster, but as one pilot said,
there are a lot of things that they can do to ward off an attack. I highly
recommend reading both articles....and if you are flying, by all means keep
your seatbelt fastened whenever you are in your seat! <G> First lesson you
learn flying in a smaller plane and given the pilots' responses, I'd say
better advice than ever.

Maryanne Stroud Gabbani
Cairo, Egypt
maryanne@ratbusters.net
www.ratbusters.net