LOL! I get to see the airport and hotelbut not even the office building, BP! Since 9-11 and bankruptcy, half our layovers are so short you need to decide if you want to eat or sleepwe usually celebrate when we get to do both! :-) Sometimes I walk out to a fast food place if theres one nearby, but thats about it on domestic layovers. But international layovers (because of legalities) are longer, so I have had some fun times on those. It also depends on if youre with a fun crew or not. Its not a whole lot of fun to be out walking around a strange city all alone. At least not for me! Ive gone out walking for hours twice in Frankfurt, and had dinner. The second FRA trip was my funnest one---was with a really fun bunch of girls. Got to go to the Great Wall, Tiananmen, and the Forbidden City in Beijingit was my first intl. tripand I didnt have a camera! That was fun, but it was over 100 degrees! Went for a nice walk and to the 100 yen shop in Osaka once. The place across from the hotel where we went to eat was in the World Trade Center! I kid you not! Did a hop-on-hop-off bus in London, which included a short boat ride down the Thamesto the Tower of London--and have a picture of me in front of Buckingham Palace. That was fun! And had dinner in Paris when I was still in trainingbut I dont like Paris or Parisiens! Also went out walking there, so have seen the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame Cathedral, and walked over one of the bridges to the "left bank!" And Ive been thru the (very short) tunnel where Princess Diana was killed on the way to the hotel. We took the subway a couple times in Paris, and I couldnt believe it! We let the first couple trains go by because they were so full we didnt think we could get in, and finally realized if we didnt just push in, we were gonna be there forever, so we pushed in with everybody else, and youhonestlydidnt need to even try to hang onto anything. We were body-to-body wedged in-between the people and couldnt have fallen over if we had tried! The only thing I hung onto was my purse! When I get to Honolulu or Kona, I usually go out walking for a whileby myself. In Kona Ive walked thru the oldest church in the islandsbut mostly just take a walk along the beach and thru all the little shops, and the same thing in HNL. The hotel is just a couple blocks from the International Market Place, so I usually spend an hour or so roaming around in there. Im not a big fan of humidity, so people will think Im nuts, but it can really be stifling over there. And I had a fun time on my first trip to Anchoragewhich is also considered intl. for us because its over water. It was December and there was 4 hours of daylitemore than I was expectingand I walked down to the Anchorage Museum which has a VERY interesting exhibit documenting Alaska from before the dawn of man to the present. Really, really interesting, and I highly recommend it if anybodys ever up there. The spooky thing when youre there, tho, is that we stay right downtown (tiny downtown!) on Fifth Street which is where something akin to a crack in the earth opened up during the 8.+ earthquake of 1964, and 4th and 5th Streets were offset by several feet when it was over with. And the tourist channel at the hotel tells all about it, complete with pictures, just so you dont forget about it! About the only other thing Ive really ever done is, on the one Manhattan layover Ive had since 9-11, I and 3 other girls went down to ground zero. The public viewing platform was still up, and I cant begin to explain the impact it had on us all to be there. Then we went to a little sidewalk café a few blocks away and had drinks! The ride down and back to the hotel on the subway was something else tho! We were lost both ways! And going back to the hotel we were half drunk too, and acting TOTALLY insane (comic relief), so we were entertaining all the New Yawkers on the subway! When flight attendants get to goofing off, we often get into our evacuation commands, so, since we were lost, we were going, "grab your ankles," "come this way," "jump, jump!" I dont know what people thot we were doing, but we were all laughing so hard we were crying, and Im kinda surprised we didnt all get locked up that time! On the other hand, there are a lot of nutty people in NYC! But I am glad I got a chance to go to ground zeroand I DO have pictures of thatand of us acting goofy on the subway! Thats allin 7 years! Otherwise its just straight to the hotel, sleep for 4 or 5 hours, and get up at 0200 to get back to whatever airport. It is DEFINITELY not the relaxed, romantic image most people probably have. The part I really like about the job is being in an airplane (I should have been born with wings)and helping people! :-) Skybird

Gifted myself a tabletop easel (Sorrento) and some brushes. Already have lots of Ceramcoat paint from when our local Beverley Fabrics store closed in Placerville (that was before we moved to So. Oregon year before last). Yesterday I went to a free intro class on tole painting, and plan to sign up starting next week. I have read lots of the earlier posts here, but it is awfully quiet, isn't it ... have a question, will post a new thread in an effort to breathe a little life into the forum. Delina

Before I was on Reader's Paradise I was (and am still) a regular poster on the Antique Roses Forum. In a post some years ago a good friend of mine there tossed off a series of spoof online names, one of which was Rosefolly. I seized upon it and registered it instantly. My friend was a bit bewildered. She had no idea someone would actually want the name! I like it for its double meaning, a folly being an ornamental garden structure, and yes, I do love roses to the point of folly, just as I do books. My real name is Paula, and I am blessed in that I actually like the name I was given by my mother. Not everyone is so lucky. However I also really enjoy having another name in the online world. Rosefolly

Thank you Tamara. I still can't find this actual thread (I lost it, haha), but I found this in my profile. That's good to know about search; hopefully I'll get used to it and it will be more useful than annoying. I'm not one who takes change well, and I admit I lost my temper a little yesterday, but I will try to be more patient. I found a thread that mentioned the "first name" trick, which is how I have Rosecandy displayed. Am I correct in believing that other users can see all the recent threads I looked at? If so is there a way to stop that? I like my privacy. ...and now I found the thread, *whew!*