Encounters with the Blimp Kind

I apologize to all for being incommunicado for the last 48 hours. I could tell you the real reason which is rather boring, or I could tell you the fantastical story of the Blimp Kind and I think, frankly, you'd prefer the latter.

Anyway, as you all know, I work on the 38th floor of a 50-floor building. Now, this is a small tower, I agree, but you cannot quite grasp the horror that is a skyscraper until you're standing at the window next to your desk and you see this bigass blimp coming right at you. A big red blimp. With the word "Saturn" printed in white ariel on it.

Now, we're not talking a blimp that's a quarter of a mile away, not at all. Probably less than that. And aimed right at us.

We wondered if Blimp!Pilot could see us. After all, we're a big honking building in the middle many big honking buildings, but there goes the blimp just blithely on its merry way right towards us. I cannot possibly stress this enough. And I don't understand this; I know that there aren't any clear landmarks in the sky so perhaps our Blimp Kind were simply lost, but it's impossible, impossible I say, to miss a forest of buildings. And believe it or not, Friday was not an ozone-action day, so our Blimp Kind cannot say they were blinded by the smog either.

Now, let me make something clear: we do get buzzed by flying objects -- some identifiable, some not -- on a regular basis. Helicopters, the occasional commercial jet, the small prop planes dragging around advertisments for Hooters ("Wings just 25 cents!") or of the political variety ("Fire our legislators now and take away their parking spots!"). And there's always the slow-moving unmarked 747 that cruises its way through downtown.

Now mind you, this wasn't our first encounter with the Blimp Kind, but this was seriously the nearest encounter. We could see the little wheels on the blimp! (And btw, those wheels are very tiny; it boggles the mind how a big balloon thingy like a blimp can land on such tiny wheels, but I'll leave that questions for the scientists and the engineers). We would have waved at the people in the blimp if only they could have seen us (we're well protected from the Blimp Kind by tinted windows, you see). However, we weren't particularly worried about a Hindenburg-style diaster as Very Big Publishing Company has equipped us all with emergency preparedness kits in case we should ever have an encounter with Blimp Kind.

However, the joy-riding Blimp Kind finally got a clue that whoa, there was a downtown, and whoa, big buildings, and narrowly missed our building. It turned, with amazing and surprising grace, upward and buzzed the 50th floor before disappearing into the smogless sky.

This story wouldn't be complete without the Return of the Blimp Kind later on in the afternoon, but we all noticed that this time, they stayed quite a bit away from downtown. Smart people.

***
Sidebar has been updated; old blogs cleared out, new RSS feeds added. I've got other techie/redecorating things I want to do, but all in good time. I'm just plain exhausted from my encounter with the Blimp Kind.