Flight Update – Fingers Crossed

November 11th, 2025

Some good news of sorts on the airline cancellations and my upcoming trip. First of all, with the shutdown likely ending by Wednesday evening, there is the possibility that the chaos at the airports might be leveling off by the time I leave on Sunday. I have been monitoring Sacramento flights each day, and Delta has not been impacted hardly at all since SMF is not in the 40 targeted airports. So far, my 9:00AM flight to LAX has left on time. So with a little bit of luck now, I’ll make it on my scheduled flights. But just in case, I am 99% packed and can head out for a rental car on a moments notice. 38 pounds of clothing, 18 pounds of camera gear.

On a totally unrelated topic, I may have mentioned in a prior post about a peculiar medical condition that I am lucky enough to have acquired – distal neuropathy, which is a progressive degeneration of the long nerves in legs and arms. Yeah, it sucks. I’ve been working with the UC Davis Neuropathy group for a while now, and had another visit with an expert in this field, yesterday. Not much came out of this meeting – basically, it’s something I just need to deal with, but the physician recommended that I stop all alcohol consumption, since it has been proven that any amount of it is an irritant to the nervous system, which likely increases the inflammation and degradation of the nerves. Wonderful. So last evening, I gave her recommendation some consideration after dinner…while I finished my glass of wine.

She did suggest that I can slowly phase into this withdrawal (it’s not like I’m slugging down a bottle every night). So I figure, since I have four or five cases of wine cellared in my wine refrigerators, I can cut back to two or three glasses over the weekend for starters, and cut that back over time. That might work….with a large enough glass.