Bigger or Better: Life outside of Texas

 I think that most people, at one time or another, want to Save the World or some variation of that. Cure cancer. Solve homelessness. Fix economies. Etc. Noble goals. Well, here I am pondering if what I do is Saving the World. Sure, I work with an under-served [hyphenated so that it is not mistaken for un-deserved] population as a day-job, and volunteer teaching children on the weekend, but I don't see that as Nobel-Prize worthy. Because it's not. I do not make a big-enough impact to merit any notice from the world. You probably won't either. And that's okay. My impact, and your impact, is going to be on a personal level. But here's the best part: the personal level is the jackpot of the whole Save the World endeavor. If, while you are serving a fellow soul, you are thinking about the World instead of the person in front of you, you are missing a key tool in effecting change: the power of relationships. Of feeling a connection to the person in front of you. None of ...

 A couple weeks ago, my family had a mini reunion in Nashville. Which is the same city Mark and I got stuck in last December after the Southwest meltdown, which happened to coordinate with our grounded Allegiant flight. Well, for monetary reasons, we chose Allegiant again to get down to Nashville. And whaddaya know, our flight had problems again, before we even got out of DC. We sat at the departure gate as the listed boarding time came and went, hour by hour, with no information from Allegiant representatives by phone or by person. The evening became incredibly-early morning, and still no clue as to what was happening. Finally, somebody showed up, accompanied by security [I guess they thought we would riot??] to tell us that the airplane had a maintenance problem, that our flight would leave later that morning, and that we should come back to the airport in a few hours. [I'll add that she wasn't the most organized representative...people would ask a question, she would make an...