Wednesday: Super sleepy

So I was lazy for dinner

Crab and artichoke dip.

Reindeer burger.

Om nom cake.

I did not eat a bear, but this bear also looks sleepy.

• There's a new ds9 out, and it supports 3d images.  I kind of can't wait to get back to work to try it out.

Did I mention?

That I got a slice of chocolate cake to go?

The cake.

I was super full after dinner, but since I didn't get cake yesterday, I've really wanted some cake. Cake cake cake.  When the waitress brought a dessert menu, I knew I'd never be able to fit it in my tummy.  "Can I get a slice of cake to go?"

"Sure!"

(In head monologue, using Mr. Burns voice from Simpsons: "Excellent.")

They individually wrapped the cake, the ice cream, and the chocolate fudge.  I tucked them all into the tiny fridge I have in my hotel room, which was probably a mistake for the fudge, and maybe the cake as well.  The fudge was kind of a brick, so I just scooped out a bit.

The cake wasn't the best ever, but was reasonably done.  There was a hint of coffee, and a very dark chocolate taste.  The ice cream was freshly made, so that's a nice touch (it doesn't hurt that I got like half a pint or so).

Anyway, desserts are always a good idea, especially when made of cake.

Not this Cake.

Tuesday: Conference Day 2!

Another day at the conference.  Today was pretty full with science sessions I wanted to attend.  That means I spent very little time at the booth.  I'll probably be making that up tomorrow, as I didn't see much that looked that interesting.

It started raining today, which means that I really would have preferred to have found a cab to take me to dinner.  Unfortunately, no cabs were available, so I just walked. In the rain. It sounds so sad until you realize I only had to walk like seven and a half blocks.  Anyway, dinner was at Simon and Seafort's

Their sign. I probably could have fixed the perspective if I wanted to.

Since this is Alaska, and they also have access to fresh fish (like Hawaii), I planned on that being the focus of my dinner.  It also helped a bit that I'd only eaten a hot dog again today, making me super hungry.

Starter: Clam Chowder.

 The soup was very well done, with lots of chunks, most of which were clams.  Nice hints of garlic in the creamy base, and I'm pretty sure there was a bit of sherry in there as well.

Main: Halibut, two ways.

My original plan was to order the halibut cheeks (pan-seared, asiago-parmesan cheese, cedar asparagus, butter sauce, fresh chives), and the waitress asked if I wanted to do a half-and-half with the other halibut preparation (halibut crab-macadamia nuts; oven roasted, king crab, tarragon, swiss, parmesan, lemon butter sauce).  If I'm only ever going to eat here once, I might as well try as much as I can.  The cheek is on the left in the picture, and was wonderful.  Perfectly cooked, with a nicely firm texture.  The cheese had toasted on the outside, and all the cheese-oils soaked into the fish.  This is probably one of the best fish preparations I've ever had.

The stuffed halibut was good, but cramming crab into something is always a good move.  This was a touch overcooked, as one end was a bit dry and a bit past "firm."  Still, om nom crab = om nom.  The potatoes basically were just there to soak up sauces.  This is an important and often overlooked job at dinner.

Side: Crab cakes.

It turns out that they have a "add some crab to your entree" option. This is, of course, the greatest idea in the history of menu design.  I added some dungeness and rock crab cakes.  The pink sushi ginger was a bit disappointing, but the citrus-y sauces (lemon and orange?) added the right flavor balance to make sure these didn't just taste like the halibut.

The service here was much better than yesterday, and combined with the better selection of food, I'd rank this as far superior than Crush.  I still haven't decided what to do for dinner tomorrow, but I'm pretty sure it's not going to be this good.  I should probably make sure it's not this expensive while I'm at it.

I also bought a book today, because I'm a big math nerd.

Oh come on, bees. I thought you were more talented than this.

Monday Random Update

1. I forgot to mention that Crush was out of flourless chocolate cake.  Now I really want flourless chocolate cake.  Or just regular cake. Cake cake cake cake cake.
2. Baman Piderman is now going to be their full time job! Everyone should watch it.
3. Is it just me, or do other people automatically rotate ninety degrees when sleeping in a king size bed?  It's like I have insufficient constraints on my theta angle.
4. These bunnies.
5. Baby vs cat. Mind control powers forbidden.

Monday: Conference Day 1

Not a bad start to the conference.  It's sometimes a bit boring sitting at a booth most of the day, but I did catch a few sessions.  I also saw a few occasions that I wish I could have found the author to advertise my poster. "Like what you're doing, but way simpler!"  Maybe I'll spam them after the conference if they haven't stopped by.

Lunch was a bit meh.  I just stopped by the concession stand to get a hot dog:

Seriously, you know what a hot dog looks like.

 Dinner was substantially better.  I went to Crush Wine Bar, which had pretty decent food.

I like Cote du Rhone, so I went with the "No Place Like Rhone" flight.

 One concern is that the service was really pretty lacking.  There were three servers, which I would have thought would be sufficient for the ~12 bar seats and ~8 tables.  However, they didn't seem to have much of a system going. This showed up for me as a missing specials menu, no silverware or napkin until I asked for it, and a somewhat slow order taking.  It wasn't really bad service, it just wasn't really as nice as I would like.

 The specials seemed reasonable, although the duck confit was immediately ruined and removed for me by the presence of broccoli.  They had an assortment of tapas-size items, but didn't really have the variety of other places (like that wine place in Austin that I can't remember the name of).

 I was also a bit disappointed in the cheese and charcuterie plate.  The clipped bit at the bottom notes you can get a 3, 5, or 7 item plate for the listed prices.  I would have assumed that that would be a selection of any of the above items (as did the couple next to me).  Instead, the three item included the top three cheeses, the five item those three cheese and either of the other sets of two, and the seven all items.  I'm also going to be Mr. Fancy-Pants and suggest that the cheese selection isn't really that adventurous.  Oh well, I didn't get it, so it's not a problem for me.

 I did get the baked mac & cheese.  This was good.  I could sort out that this had garlic, red peppers (? maybe? maybe just some chili oil?  There was a definite spice to it), goat cheese (because duh, goatiness), and cheddar.  I think there was probably a third cheese as well.  In any case, a very tasty starter.

I went with the special gumbo for my main.  Juicy tasty shrimp and crab in a spicy base.  I would have liked a bit more crab flavor, possibly by incorporating some crab stock in with the base.  It was a touch overly-spicy as well, so the sweetness of the crab and shrimp was a bit overpowered.  If they hadn't been super fresh, they would have just been lost.

All in all, not a terrible dinner, and I'm probably being overly picky.  Still, I'm not totally convinced that I'd recommend it.

Oh, the wines:

• Domaine de L'Espigouette 09: fruity, with a light body.
• Domaine Charite 09: similar, but with a sharper, spicier note. Probably my favorite of the flight.
• L'Ameillaud 10: This was softer, with a "rounder" flavor.  Probably my least favorite, although I'm not totally sure that I have a good reason why.

Is it just me, or do other people get "taste plots" in their head when they try to describe wine tastes?

Links:

• Seriously Georgia? Using inmates to pick onions? Didn't we have a big discussion about that 150 years ago?
• I still hate Ross Douthat, but I'm too tired today to elaborate why.  Make up your own reasons.
• I continually feel bad for Lil' E.  Plus, Sinfest continues to be one of the best comics around.
• Puppy!
• Squirrel!
• This is by far the most disgusting thing I've seen on Sandwich Monday in a long time.
• I guess this explains why the people on House Hunters always choose the wrong stupid house.

Sunday: Anchorage!

First off, Alaska Airlines has better seats than United.  They have at least an extra inch or two in legroom, making it not so awful to sit there for a six hour flight.  Plus, they have POG on their flights connecting to Hawaii, and POG is delicious.

This "blueberry macadamia" cookie was not so delicious.  Still, free cookie.

Land!

 After napping all day after landing (because my hour nap turned out to be about six times longer than planned), I was heading out to register for the conference and check out the booth.  On the way, I ran into my boss, who had the booth bundle.  We set it up, which was an easier task than I expected.  It's convenient that it only has one way to be arranged.

Conference registration area.

 I then walked back to the hotel, checking out the busy metropolitan area that is downtown Anchorage.  I did spot a couple of the restaurants I'd listed last week, so I have a better idea of where things are.

You can see the mountains in the background behind the hotel. 

Panorama view from my hotel room window.

Saturday: In case I forget to post at the airport

Here's a bunch of videos!

Seriously. This dumbass wants to be president?

New Baman Piderman!

One of these days, Paul Krugman is just going to snap, and he's going to start stabbing stupid people.

Do you like Carmina Burana?  Here's what they're not saying.

I had this idea in undergrad, and wondered why no one had made a magic device to turn real life into 3d models.  It turns out that it required more technology than was available then.  Now that technology is available in a toy.

This squirrel is super scared, and super tired.  Extra douche points for the guy filming for both pointing out that it's a "female monorail driver" and wanting the squirrel to get out of the way so he can go waste his money at a park built by a mouse.

Mice aren't even fucking cute, jackass.

Friday: I should probably be packing

But I have like 24 hours until my flight leave for Alaska, so I have time tomorrow to pack.  I should get laundry done today, though, since that's something that does require a little bit more planning ahead.  I did discover that printing a poster meant that I got to have fun nightmares about printing posters.  It didn't even make any sense that I was printing so many out, especially since they were full of gibberish text.

I don't really have much else to fill space today.  I did discover that something I've been postponing for months is actually mathematically very simple.  It's convenient when functions automatically normalize such that the integral over all space is one.  Very convenient.

Look closely at the left hand door panel at that yellow security sign.  Did someone stab a baguette through the window?

Sushi cats. Because internet.

• Apparently that crappy actor I've never heard of claims he never did anything creepy on the plane.  Not really that much else he could do, I guess.
• This may be the best twitter account ever.
• I do exactly the same thing when I listen to NPR, and if you don't, you're a soulless automaton.
• Squirrel and Cat are friends.
• I woke up this morning from my stupid nightmare about poster printing to find this link that Julie sent.  My initial thought was, "Why does Julie care about Amethyst, since I've read comics for years and only know about her from some cameos in Crisis on Infinite Earths?"  Then I saw the Teen Titans news.  Holy crap, that's great.  I would like to see a Super Best Friends Forever series too, but I think everyone has said that at this point.

Thursday: there was still some text that had to read psalms

It turns out that speech to text is still not an exact science.

I did get my poster printed today. Modern printers are so much easier than the old one I used in grad school.  That one always seemed to be broken, or breaking, or something.  Besides, I always seemed to need to switch  the orientations to get things to come out correctly.  I think I half-printed one poster three times before finally getting it to come out correctly.  This poster came out correctly on the first try.  The colors look nice, and everything looks crisp, and most importantly, I didn't have to fight printers or anything.

Well, ok, I did have to hack the postscript to get it to rotate correctly, because ps2ps and psnup decided that I always wanted letter size paper when I tried to use them to rotate it.  Still, editing a bounding box and an orientation header keywords isn't really that hard to do.

Sometimes it's really cool to sit at the prismatic desk.

I really want this shower.  Holy crap is that cool looking.

• Working on the poster made me read the wikipedia page on paper sizes.  Occasionally, really boring things become super interesting to read.
• Swedish prisons.
• Jigglypuff. S.
• It's like Republicans don't understand how the internet works.  Hilariously don't understand.
• Tiny village.

Wednesday: Why am I so sleepy today?

It's to the point where I had no desire to cook dinner tonight, so I just picked up crappy sushi for dinner. Extra crappy. I should have thrown it on the floor and insulted them for it.

I also forgot this story from yesterday: I was driving home on Piikoi, and there was a guy crossing the street with his dog (black lab, let's say? It was a pretty big happy looking dog, and stayed that way throughout the entire encounter).  I was in the left lane, and slowed down so that he would have no problem crossing my lane way before I got there.  In the right lane was a black Mercedes, the driver of which was either not paying attention, or hated big happy looking dogs.  I see the guy stop in the middle of the street, at which point the Mercedes slams on the brakes to stop before hitting him.  By this point, I've reached the crosswalk, and have pulled up next to the Mercedes and stopped, as I don't hate big happy looking dogs.  The guy is shouting at the driver of the Mercedes, and is swinging his bag of dog poop around, making it look like he's going to throw it at the windshield. He eventually keeps going and reaches the other side of the street.  I finish my drive home, but notice in my rear view mirror that the Mercedes is still stopped in the street, with the driver in shock.

Tl;dr: people in fancy cars are usually pretty crappy drivers.

I've also spent part of this evening looking at restaurants in Anchorage.  I figure that seafood should probably also be the focus there, as they're also pretty close to the ocean.  My initial thought was to get salmon and king crab legs.  Looking at menus, it turns out that king crab is crazy expensive.  Still, when else am I going to be in Alaska?  It also looks like halibut is local and popular, so that's probably worth checking out.  Since it's easier to have a list ready-to-go, I'm going to link to the places that look promising now.

• Snow City Cafe.  I know I'm going to want pancakes when I get in, and this place looks like it does breakfast.
• Crush wine bar. That menu has a lot of tasty looking dishes.  Meatloaf au foie gras? That's a good idea.
• Humpy's Alehouse.  This seems to get lots of good reviews on yelp.  It kind of just looks like a random pub-style place though.  Kind of on the fence on this one.
• Simon and Seafort's. "CHILI-SMOKED TIGER PRAWNS/BACON-CHEESE GRITS, BARBECUE HOLLANDAISE SAUCE". Wow. I kind of want to eat that now.
• The Crow's Nest. Looks a bit expensive, but it's a restaurant on top of a hotel.  I'm a sucker for eating way high in the air.  Plus, that salmon looks tasty: "house cured pancetta, chardonnay & caramel poached apples, pearl onions, brussel leaves, fingerlings, orange gastrique"
• Glacier Brewhouse. A lot of places seem to make their own beer there.  Another pub style place, although this one looks a bit more upscale than Humpy's. Also: better name.
• Club Paris. Isn't a four-inch, 14oz filet mignon better classified as a chateaubriand?
• Modern Dwellers Chocolate Lounge. A lounge. For chocolate. Yes.
• Sacks Cafe. Decent looking dinner menu.  Plus they make the food look good in the slideshow.  And they put a giant cheese plate in that slideshow.

We'll see how many of these I get to.  Nine restaurants in five and a half days is probably a bit optimistic.

"I will sit on you. Then you'll cooperate."

I'm not saying that someone who is tiny and super cute has a birthmark that looks exactly like she was stabbed, but I am saying exactly that.

• This is kind of hilarious in that "I'm ok with actors I've never heard of ruining their life in the most schadenfreude way possible" way.
• Yes. Insurance for people with chronic illness is indeed redistribution.  That's half the point of insurance. The other half is the fact that we're not fucking wolves, and believe that we should take care of people who are ill.  
• I want bear salt and pepper shakers.
• Well, now I feel like an idiot because I never thought of this.
• It was only when I saw Jamie in this totally NSFW Mythbusters fan comic that I realized what it was.
• Pizza!

Tuesday: Venus transit!

Unfortunately it was cloudy a lot today, and then the photo I did take through the telescope was horribly out of focus.

See?

Luckily we live in the future now, and so I can watch the whole thing via the internet, even if I was in the best location to see it live.  The benefit of the internet feed is that they have a lot more filters that I wouldn't have.

See?

Another disappointment was that I didn't go eat pancakes like I did for the 2004 transit.  Now I really want pancakes.  If nothing else, I'll have some on Sunday, once I get to Anchorage on the red eye.  Turns out you can red-eye north as well as east.

Random baby deer.

• It's worth clicking through to Alan Dressler's slides to see what science can be done with these free spy science telescopes.
• I just got new shoes.  Why didn't they have pikachu style when I needed them?
• Epic sandwich time sounds good.  I was about to say, "maybe I'll do this this weekend," but I'm travelling then.  Next weekend, then?
• Those look a touch more rare than I'd like for ground beef, but the idea sounds great.  Pierogis are never the wrong answer.
• You know what I think when I'm eating the most processed cheese ever? "Gee, this would be better if it looked like a ninja. Or a turtle. Or both."

Monday: I have no idea what to call this

Creamy mushroom pasta?  That sounds like some really bad frozen dinner, whereas this was full of super-deliciousness.  Let's just look at the recipe:

 Here are most of the ingredients.  A big portabello, some king oyster mushrooms, shallot, basil, vermouth, cream, garlic paste, and umami paste to cheat.  Off camera I have two strips of bacon cooking and rendering, and a pot of water on boil for the linguine that I don't have a picture of until plating below.

Basically, I used the mushroom/bacon combo from last friday's grill-stravaganza, and expanded it into a pasta sauce.  Once the bacon was cooked, I removed it, drained most of the grease out, and added the shallot and sliced mushrooms:

Once those were largely done, I added the pastes to boost the flavor, and then deglazed with the vermouth.  That reduced, and then I added the cream and corrected the seasoning at the end.  Add in the linguine and toss, add some parmesan (and a bit of pasta water to get the consistency right), and then plate:

One day the phone will take the picture with the correct orientation.

Top with the bacon (now crumbled up) and a quick chiffonade of basil.  Plate with some bread slathered in Naked Cow dairy local butter.  I wish WF had a decent wheat loaf, as the rye I got was a bit too harsh with the smoothness of the pasta.  Still, it worked well.  The vermouth brings a light sweetness to the sauce, and the bacon gives just the right amount of salt (I used no extra salt).  I wasn't totally happy with the sauce thickness, and after I had eaten half I remembered that I didn't add any butter to it at the end.  That would have probably fixed the slight issue I had with it.  I'm repeating the recipe tomorrow, so I'll have to try then and see what happens.

Business cat.

• I guess it's good that the Queen had a nice jubilee.  I can't really think of a better example of this than the clear trampling of the labor used to provide security for her stupid boat-mageddon.  
• I love how old advertisements were written.
• After reading this, it's perfectly normal to feel angry.  Just remember that old people are dying right this second, and eventually the Republican party will do the same thing.
• Yeah, I think if I was NASA, I'd send someone to make NYC feel really bad about this.

Another eclipse?

Yes!  This one is a lunar eclipse though:

I did another quick copy-paste montage.

The clouds were in the way, and I quickly got tired of having to try to find quick holes to look through.  These are probably the best I'm going to be able to do tonight.

Saturday: AUS-HNL

I seem to always have trouble on my return flights from Austin.  I've been stuck in Denver and Phoenix, and I was reasonably sure that I was going to end up stuck in San Francisco as well.

I arrived at AUS with plenty of time to spare, and went through the "Premiere Line" for security, which means I get to skip over all the waiting and go directly to the driver's license check.  Yay, frequent flier benefits!  However, once I was through the first check, I had to put up with the perpetual mockery of security that is the checkpoint.  A lot of families were flying, and they were all shuttled through the magnetometer with no subsequent checks.  However, I had to opt-out of the radiation machine, which caused a slight panic.  It turns out that they had six people working the entire checkpoint.  Two people watching the baggage x-ray, one before the check, one after the check, one doing bag checks, and one sitting on his ass being "in charge."  This meant that there was no one available to do the patdown that the opt-out brings.  They had to wait until the lady doing bag checks finished, then she took the place of the post-check guy, who was then available to do the check.

Until, of course, Assy McGee decided that the guy running x-ray #2 should do it, and abandon his post.  I have no idea what the logic behind this was, but he seemed to be insistent on it until someone else pointed out that then the bags would have no one looking at them.  Finally, some random TSA guy was found, and he did the stupid check.  I really can't wait for the TSA "Not A Terrorist" list to be made, so I can get through this dumb show without having to deal with incompetence and nuisance shoe taking-off.

I then got pizza:

which put me behind the worst fast food orderer I've seen in a long time.  First he didn't know what pizza he wanted. Then, after choosing and moving on to pay, he decided he wanted a second slice, and asked if it could just be put into the same box.  Since a box holds one slice, that couldn't happen, so he accepted the second box.  Finally, he needed two beers.  Again, a problem, because the airport people are only allowed to sell one beer at a time.  He took the one beer, went over to stand at a counter, chugged it, and then got back in line to get #2.

Anyway, by the time I got to the gate, I noticed an important fact: there was no plane connected to the jetbridge.  This continued for almost an hour, until the flight came in late, leading to the second problem: there was no crew to fly the now-available plane to SFO.  I've never been able to understand how airlines can manage their logistics so poorly.  You know you have a flight at airport X at time T.  That flight requires a set of N crew members, who need to be replaced after some number of hours.  Therefore, you need some number of crew sets k = ceil(dT / H).  Not having a crew I think has been the problem in both my Denver and Phoenix flight issues.

Upon arriving at SFO, I discovered the actual reason for the delay for the flight: the airport only had one open runway, and all traffic had to use that.  I didn't know anything about this, suggesting that United didn't do a very good job of notifying travelers.  The one benefit of this was that all flights were delayed, so leaving Austin an hour late didn't decrease my layover very much.  I went to the gate, and saw what I thought was my name noting that I'd been given an upgrade to first class, as seat 3-A was listed for someone with my same first initial and first three characters of my last name.

So, using this set of data for last name frequencies, and this data for first names (assuming first initial fractions are reasonably constant over time, so I don't need to convolve an age cohort function against time variable first names), suggests that my first name is more likely than random (0.068126 compared to 1/26 = 0.038462), but that my truncated last name isn't that common (0.0024997 compared to SMI = 0.010087).  Therefore, randomly selecting from the US population gives me a upgrade name that has a probability of 1.7030e-04.  Now, confining this to a plane makes it a birthday problem, and this seat map suggests a United 757-200 has 188 seats.  This leads to a probability that someone else on the plane has the same upgrade name as me of 0.031512 (Edit: For comparison, Roger Smith has a probability of 0.10684, significantly worse than me.) This is higher than I would have thought, but since it's a birthday problem, that's pretty much always the case.  Still, this would give me a ~97% confidence that I had the upgrade to first class, meaning I would be able to count on a meal on the flight.

I had some emergency chocolate that I'd packed before leaving home, and I discovered it while sitting there.  It had a raspberry filling.

Tl;dr: I didn't get the upgrade, this flight fell into the 3.15%.

In any case, I made it home without much trouble (despite all that), and was able to get to see a really nice sunset over the Pacific Ocean:

I'm sure the clouds have a specific name too. Altocumulus?  Is that right?

Sunday: Day after vacation laziness

It turns out that I did pick up some jetlag on this trip, despite having a "non-traditional" sleep schedule while in Texas.  This led to me waking up this morning at 7:30.  I'm not sure if I'm happy about this or not, so I guess I'll have to see what time I wake up tomorrow, when I actually have something to do.

Today's main goals were:

1. Eat a burrito.
2. Get some groceries.
3. Probably eat some dinner or something?
4. Crap, I need to do laundry, too.

So I've done half of my list at this point, which I'm counting as a win.  First up, burrito:

It turns out I basically got exactly the same as last time.  I did get less salsa, so it wasn't so overwhelmingly hot. They still have queso that separates, but it's tasty, so it's not that big of a deal.

I did get groceries, which ended up being far more expensive than I expected they would be.  I'm still not completely sure why that was, but since I'm leaving again in a week, hopefully I'll eat them all before I leave (and they go bad).  I think the menu plan for this week is going to be:

• Sunday: I'm still kind of full from the burrito, so I think I'm just going to make a sandwich and then have some ice cream and fruit.
• Monday: Some sort of mushroom pasta thing.  I bought some portabellos, so the thought is to slice them thinly, add some cream, and put that over linguine.
• Tuesday: Same thing.
• Wednesday: I had a really good "BLT"/grilled cheese while in Austin, so I think I'm going to try to recreate it.  The nice thing about this was that it used sundried tomatoes and basil along with the bacon.  BLB?  That sounds like internet slang though.
• Thursday: Huh.  Looks like I didn't plan far enough out.  Let's say something from the freezer?
• Friday: I don't leave this day, do I?  Nope. Saturday night.  Ok, so I'll need something here.  Let's leave it as a float day, in case I get lazy earlier in the week.

I wish every week could be vacation week.

• That is a creepy giant skeleton.
• Puppy!
• I wish everyone would follow these rules on planes.
• I saw this giant cookie this morning, and seriously thought about making it today. Then I realized that eating an entire giant cookie wasn't likely to be a healthy way to spend a day.  I will make it soon, though. Probably after getting back from Anchorage.
• Holy crap, the dodgy Pokemon people are still doing the episode reviews? I need to catch up on the Black and White ones.
• More different puppy.
• Squirrel thief!
• I wish Paul Krugman did every policy/economics/etc. interview.  It would be nice to see people getting called on their bullshit.
• Oh, Team Rocket.

Saturday: I have no idea what time it is

But I'm home, so that's the important thing.  More details tomorrow, I think, since I did pick up a bit of jetlag on the return trip.

Sudoku airplane post 2

Sudoku airplane post 1

Seriously, AUS?

This has had to have been the worst security experience ever at Austin-Bergstrom. I was able to get through the premier security check without hassle (avoiding the hundred families crammed in the regular queue). However, in another version of "why bother to be consistent when we can be assholes," I had to opt-out of the radiation box, whereas families could just do the magnetometer alone.

How does that make any sense?

To make matters worse, they were "short handed today," and didn't have anyone available to do the manual check. How do you mismanage things so badly that you don't have enough people to do all the useless busy-work security theater you've invented? You made the stupid rules up, therefore you should know how many people you need.

Plus the plane doesn't appear to be here yet, suggesting that I'm not going to be boarding in two minutes.

Friday: Why can't vacations last longer?

Last day of vacation, which was reasonably lazy, although there was some shopping.  I finally bought new shoes, although I didn't take a picture of them yet.  That'll probably happen on Sunday when I get back home and go out shopping for groceries.

My shoes are also 100% less stripper-y than these shoes.  "Don't these look good, Mom?" Really? For what?

Dinner was a variety of grilled tastiness:

Burgers, three types of sausage, corn,

Orange honey habanero flank steak, yellow squash.

Seriously, I need to steal a lot of these ideas for when I get home.  I'm perpetually disappointed that my meat counter doesn't have any of the tasty things that Central Market does here.  It also helps that things don't immediately rot the moment you look at them in the store.  Maybe if I had A/C, and cranked it up all the way, I could avoid that problem as well.

• Cardinal Timothy Dolan is pretty much a terrible person.  I wonder at which level you completely sell out your morals to tell other people how they're bad people.  Also: not as cool as this Dolan.
• Sriracha spray? Wouldn't that clog?
• I can't wait for Games Workshop to go out of business.  Warhammer isn't that wonderful anyway, and charging piles of money for something that can be made cheaply isn't a very sustainable business.
• Zigzagoon!
• Oh, Japan.