Dropping Trou Abroad

The annual Seattle festival of rain and cloudy gloom has resumed. This week's state revenue forecast reports are casting more of a pall on the day. RantWoman would not in the least mind fewer reminders that she has not done nearly enough travel over the last few months. Instead RantWoman is getting to travel by proxy.

First a short, not completely tangential digression:

Dear Merchants. You know who you are. RantWoman spends or in the past has spent a lot of money in your fine establishments, and, horrors, sometimes RantWoman presently ducks into your doors specifically NOT intending to spend money but only to relieve her bus bladder. With the onset of fall gloom and other considerations, RantWoman has had to adjust her caffeine levels and other fluid management efforts; it's a RECESSION and RantWoman's money supply has not adjusted correspondingly.

RantWoman assures you that she would LIKE to reward provision of restroom services and would LIKE to be purchasing more merchandise than she currently can. RantWoman assures you that when she has money, merchandise in the vicinity of clean openly available restrooms to relieve RantWoman's bus bladder is MUCH more likely to attract RantWoman cash that merchandise not accompanied by restroom services. And RantWoman begs, pleads, urges you to be patient and thanks you VERY sincerely in the meantime for restroom services.

RantWoman for her part is also happy to do what she can to be an information and referral source to help accommodate the bladder relief needs of bus drivers, delivery persons, and others whose work demands carry them hours sometimes between available facilities.

RantWoman has visited enough restrooms beyond our nation's borders especially to want deeply to appreciate simple standards such as basic cleanliness, toilet paper that should not double as a Brillo pad, plumbing to carry waste streans away more discretely than an open hole with railroad ties whizzing by underneath and numerous other amenities that RantWoman admits can sometimes add up to Spoiled American Syndrome.

RantWoman has been thinking of all this while following a friend of hers, a motor cycle-riding pastor who teaches Trauma Recovery from time to time in Africa. Here is an especially piquant item, though the subsequent item is another vignette in the same vein.

http://sillypoorgospel.blogspot.com/2010/09/dawn-of-dead-travelers.html



RantWoman cannot resist adding a couple items of fashion advice and sartorial commentary, commentary especially for women built like RantWoman and for people travelling in hot climates during summer months:

1. Loose flowing garments such as skirts or jumpers have a lot to recommend them in terms of airflow during great heat. RantWoman's experience with "great heat" extends to Europe and Easterne Europe during a heat wave, and to Mexico before the country has gotten, if one believes all the media, overrun by narcos. In other words, RantWoman's experience is nothing to sneeze at; RantWoman is glad for a reprise in memory and means to remember again if faced woth hotter travel in the future.

2. RantWoman has no idea how skirts work on actual linebackers, but if one, like RantWoman is simply built like a linebacker, wearing skirts and jumpers can be a lot less intimidating to locals than the US custom
of wearing jeans everywhere. A jumper gives one a layer of clothing between certain documents and pickpockets. Again, it's cooler too, though probably not so easily consonant with motorcycle-riding.

3. Finally, there is the all-important matter of discretion: it is possible though definitely more optional to moon one's surroundings in a skirt than in pants. Word!