Friday: Home again

It only took a week, but I finally satisfied my pancake craving:

With a big waffle, but still.

 Anyway, the hotel had a breakfast buffet, which means piling lots of yummy stuff and eating it until stuffed:

In addition to the waffle and obvious things, there is reindeer sausage (reindeer is super tasty. I wish I could get some here), and a cheese blintz.  I'm no blintzologist (nor blintzonomer), but this had apples in it.  Is that normal?

After breakfast, I went back to my room to finish packing, and to take a picture of this:

Piece of tape that holds the curtains closed.  I'm not sure that yellow is the least conspicuous color they could have chosen.

Then airport, and dealing with really stupid people at the airport.  One nice thing is that the TSA people at ANC didn't bother with all the stupid crap for the opt-out.  This meant it took about a minute to do, instead of the five minutes it always seems to take elsewhere.  As for the stupid people, let's put together a list of rules for airports:

1. Don't take your damn shoes off when you're standing in line to have your ID checked. That just makes you unprepared to show your ID.
2. Don't think that "my keys, phone, and belt totally won't set off anything." You're fucking it up for everyone when you have to go back and put things on the belt.
3. Don't have a conversation with the person scanning boarding passes.  Her job is to load everyone on the plane. Not answer trivia questions about your trip.
4. Hand the gate agent one boarding pass.  Not all of them.  Not the ones that got you to this airport. Not the ones for the future legs of the trip.  The one for this plane.
5. If you don't know when to board, wait until they say, "final boarding call."
6. Boarding group 1 is probably not you.
7. If you're in boarding group 99, just have a seat.
8. If you have kids younger than 12, just check their luggage.  Otherwise they're going to leave it somewhere, and you're going to end up carrying it anyway.
9. No one cares where you're going, or where you're from.  We're all not magically friends because we're trapped in a plane together.  If this was a city bus, you'd be the crazy guy telling us about the people who live in your hat.

One problem with getting to the airport really early is that I had to listen to a crazy guy talk to someone who can't show apathy.  The crazy guy apparently had just been fired from his fishing boat, and was on his way home to Hawaii since all the other fishing boats had already set out to sea.  I assume this is normal, but as I'm not a fisherman, I don't know.  In any case, he claimed that the reason he was fired was that "they were all like drinkin' all the time, and I just told them that I didn't think that was right."  Let's take that as Option A.

He also made the wonderful comment, "see, my ex-captain's wife is my ex-girlfriend's daughter."  Let's parse that for a moment.  The captain of the fishing boat (that he was fired from) is married.  Crazy Guy used to date someone, who happens to be the mother of the captain's wife.  Let's say that's Option B as to why CG was fired.  Option C is obviously, "because he's a moron," as I think that's a safe assumption.

The funny thing is, I think Option D is actually the most likely: "Yeah, they didn't take it very well when I told her she was just like her bitch mother."  That does reinforce Option C, though.

Alaska Air has free crappy mai-tais when you fly to Hawaii. Also: crappy cookies.

 One neat thing I was able to see was this:

which Bad Astronomer tells me is a glory.  Cool.

And then I had pizza for dinner. Om nom.