Spending the next week at the South Seas Island Resort on Captiva.  It’s a swell place – the sun rises directly across from the balcony, dolphins frolic in the channel below,  the best hotel food I’ve had since Bali, the kids are stoked and if the hotel ever gets around to sending a plunger this could turn out to be one hell of a nice vacation. 

   Not sure why, and this might be more than anyone wants to hear, but nobody seems to go on flying days.  Jumbo jet constipation perhaps, and it becomes particularly dicey when your green-conscious hotel has low-pressure toilets that flush as lazily as syrup soaking through a thatch roof.  And I choked the plumbing this morning.

   How hard is it to obtain a plunging? I’d have thunk it pretty easy – it took five minutes for a guy to show up with extra coffee when I called for that.  They couldn’t have just given him a plunger to drop off? Nope.  Some time, over an hour ago, housekeeping said they have “engineering” come right over.  20 minutes later a call to the front desk got me a mini-lecture,  ”You see Mr. Roberts, how that works is that a call has to be made to engineering…”  Nice, I don’t need to understand the process of getting a freaking plunger from some closet in the resort over to my asphyxiated john – I need to just have it.  We got a line out the door!

   I’m about to send Elsie over to housekeeping, or wherever the hell engineering is, and surprise them with how intestinally “productive” a 3 yr old can be. And then she can dazzle the bastards with her toilet paper-helicopter tricks.  I’ll keep you posted.