Boeing, the picnic, and puffy oranges

Monday, June 13, 2022

Puffy oranges are ugly, so maybe they don't sell them at Safeway. I've only bought them at bodegas, but if you see 'em, buy 'em. They're full-size oranges, but they peel easily, like a satsuma. Takes only a few seconds. The puffy oranges want to be peeled!

Did we have a nice time at the family picnic? I did. Hope you did.

Thanks, Carl & Kathy, for putting everything together!

I didn't do much walking around and talking to everyone, sorry. I'm not social by nature, and better at talking with one or two or maybe three people than a big crowd, even when it's a crowd of family and I love 'em all. It's just another of my many mental malfunctions. Collect 'em all. So mostly I sat in a chair and ate three hours of lunch, chatting with whoever happened to be nearby.

I wanted to say hey to Kelly, but by then I was all out of 'talk' for the day, so 'hey' is all I said. If I didn't say much to you either, well, that's Doug in a crowd. Don't take it personally.

The #124 bus is one of my frequent rides, and it goes past the Boeing plant where Dad worked when I was a kid. Many, many times I was in the car when Mom dropped him off there, or picked him up. Snoopy no longer rides on the nose of the SST, but the covered sidewalk Dad walked along is still there.

He loved airplanes. He could look, up in the sky, it's a bird, no, it's a plane, and even miles above he could tell you the make and model by the sound of its engine or the sweep of its wing. Dad put an airplane on the kitchen floor, fer goodness' sake.

He was proud to work for Boeing, and often talked about how airplanes fly, and why Boeing airplanes were built better than Brand X. Dad was right, Boeings were better built than Brand X, and he'd be frustrated, I think, that they're not any more.

Now Boeing's headquarters is always on the roll, farther and farther from the workers who design and build the planes. That physical distance has led to a philosophical distance, where the designers and riveters are trying to make planes that fly reliably, while management just wants to make planes that fly cheaply. Pretty sure Dad wouldn't disagree with my assessment, that it's led to planes that don't fly quite as well as Boeing planes used to fly.

If I wasn't such a cranky old fart, I'd be saying all the above on social media, but I hate that scene.

Over and out until next time.