Birth control pills cause brain damage

As I start this current journal the clock is notching towards 11pm. That means I have been awake, more or less, for close to 34 hours, apart from the odd catnap on Alitalia.  The flight departed Pearson at 4:30pm, arriving in Rome shortly before 7;30 Monday morning, In typical Italian fashion, they ran out of white wine about 20 minutes after bar service opened and the red ( Chateau du Plonk 2012 ( October?) was exhausted by the time they hit row 10 at mealtime- I was in row 11. The hostess tried to appease me with Italian beer, which, for the uninitiated, tastes like budweiser after it has been through dialysis!.   The connecting flight from Rome to Istanbul left promptly, 65 minutes late, but luckily the gas from the garlic laced chicken gave us enough extra thrust that we made up a half hour and arrived only 20 minutes late.  A cheap $5.00 per person shuttle got us within 10 minutes of various hotels in the area adjacent to Taksim, known as Beyoglu. A series of confusi...

The trip is on.               And we are are at T minus 3 and counting. Unlike past trips where I have used the services of various tour agencies like Insight and Trafalgar, this one is a "solo flight".   After travelling large sections of Eastern Europe a couple of years back, wanting to sucker punch a Momma's Boy from Florida by the name of Jeff who whined whenever he couldn't get his own way, I decided that I would henceforth avoid travelling on buses tours with annoying "sixty-somethings"- especially when they are actually younger than me but mentally seem ten years older.    If that isn't bad enough, I recal a bus trip in Greece when I was a "youthful" 55 year old and I seemed to spend most of my time waiting for the lard ass 20 something Americans to catch up.  Nuff bitchin!  The flight from Pearson leaves around 5pm Sunday and lands in Rome some 8 1/2 hours later. With only 2 hours between flights there is no time to squ...