Well my ruse with the walking stick didn't work. Despite limping up to the reservations desk, and despite my luck in getting an obviously gay clerk, my walking stick did nothing to promote me out of my cattle-class seat into an exit-row or better. What was worse, since I'd been in line, along with many others, for almost an hour before checking in, I'd had conversations with fellow passengers. So I sheepishly felt compelled to limp around with my damned walking stick until we boarded.

When I was finally in my seat (accomplished by a kind of parallel-parking), my knees were pressed against the seat in front of me, and my neck was floating in thin air, about 8 inches above the head rest. I was going to have to sit like that for over four hours, all the way to Chicago.

But my luck was in - a silver-haired grandmomma of a flight-attendant found an empty exit-row seat up-front for me, and I was whisked away to comfort, in the nick of time.

So I got there in a good mood, as the sun was setting. The our headquarters in the south countryside, not water-logged this far West, looked peaceful in the red glow.

I spent the evening settling in, ordering a salad, and catching up finally with email, which I'd allowed to get disgracefully behind.

The last time I'd been here, the heat and humidity had been suffocating. It was therefore pleasant to wake up to a misty, slow, cool start of the day. In fact I didn't even realize I had a balcony until the morning!

I'm here this time for a training class called "Top Gun" - why it's called that, I cannot fathom. Certainly, meeting the other employees who were taking the class, nobody looked like Tom Cruise. There was one cute, tall, gentlemanly, boy-next-door from Houston, however, and luck placed me next to him at lunch. When I'd been talking earlier in class, he'd been obviously staring at me with interest. Now at lunch, I learned that it was because I'd mentioned Scotland, and his forbearers were from Glasgow. The wedding-band he wore was the final nail in the coffin of my burgeoning fantasy of a nice Texas boy for a date.

The class was certainly very well put-together and well-presented, but since it's aimed more at sales people, my attention faded in and out. I'm still repulsed by the art of selling. One guy, a VP, all but implied that it's acceptable to lie to a customer. For a presentation on Wednesday, we will each be video-taped giving a cold sales pitch to someone we supposedly encounter on an airflight. I told the instructor that the manner in which we were expected to speak was not something I felt I could do - the idea of it left me slightly sickened. She was quite understanding, and suggested I just respond to it in the way I'd respond if it really happened to me - i.e. someone I met on a plane asked me to explain what my company does. Of course, if this really happened to me, I'd probably say "let's talk about something else, shall we?"

The last three new employees in my office in San Francisco were here in the class too, and all three of them are kind of funky women whom I like. In fact, all three could possibly be lesbians, though I'm not exactly very good at spotting them. I like hanging out with them though.

After class and an extended work out at the company gym, I headed back to the hotel, pretty worn out.