November 17. Thursday Night.

Hi Journey.

Casey is quite smart. That girl steered a new client toward her big sis from halfway round the world. Plus, she's found a broadband connection so now we can Skype each other. Free chat from Maldives to the Midwest . Pretty cool.

Brady hooked me up here at home. I figure I can legitimately write his service call off, since Casey is now bird-dogging CD leads from the Pacific.

Casey isn't letting on who she wheedled a broadband connection from over there. It's not the astronomer, though. I just know there's no toll on this end.

Little sis has always been quite keen on spindling separate strands of circumstance into a strong hawser. It's why she always gets upgraded to business class on her United flights. Years back, just when she started traveling she befriended somebody with connections. Case found out what they needed, secured it for them, and now—walla!—all these years later she's perma-upgraded on United.

You'd think it was some management suit, with that kind of power; or at least somebody in IT. Nope. Our girl helped a guy in the janitorial staff at the Field Museum in Chicago on that first great adventure ten years ago. Of course, she was in a jam, since he was the one caught her sleeping away up high in a small lum hut on stilts in the South Pacific display, cradling a little plastic outrigger canoe like a teddy bear.

Case quickly uncovered the fact he had a kid that was genius in math and science but absolutely sucking wind in Spanish: straight Ds. Plus, all the Latin in his biology and chemistry was driving him crazy. Kid was a fantastic athlete; a shoe-in for a full ride in wrestling at Iowa if he could clear that language hurdle.

Casey drilled him in vocab via the internet for three years. For free.

Guess what? Six years later when Case starts flying about she looks up her old pal and finds out he's graduated from Iowa and working on his MBA at Wharton. And so they talk, and Casey learns that his dad is now a janitor at… (you guessed it, Journey).

United.

Now, all sorts of people in any corporation print out their emails. And sometimes they don't shred those emails….and on occasion those emails end up in the trash, not even wadded up, just resting naked in the trashcan for God and the whole world to see.

And so sometimes a janitor that knows certain things about certain people and can remain discrete—at depth—can call a favor now and again for a relative.

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