On the road again
Apr. 16th, 2006 01:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pecuniumI'm in Tenn. The weather is all right. A tad more humid than I usually have to deal with, but not so much as to be oppressive. The dogwood is in bloom. I think it's either a poor year, or overrated. There are a couple of cardinals flitting about, and lots of robins. I forget, living in Calif., and spending most of my time in the west, just how redolent of green, growing, things the air can be. The verges here are also dense (left untended the eastern part of the US reverts to le foreste sauvage so that even in the spring there is the faint whiff of rot.
I despair of ever getting through a TSA checkpoint without something of mine being questioned. SFO has signs saying one need not remove one's shoes, but they insisted everyone do so. Having seen, more than one, the abuse of cheap authority by TSA, I didn't even try to point to the signs. They swabbed both my camera bag, and my shoes. Burbank ran my pocket watch through the x-ray three times.
On the other hand, the snake went unnoticed. It's not illegal to carry a snake aboard a plane, but even before idjots starting making movies about it, it was problematic, because not everyone in the chain of gatekeepers knows the rules... see above about petty power; so when taking one to someone the easiest way to do it used to be to put it in a small box, put that box in one's jacket and walk through the metal detecto. That, because one much put one's jacket through the x-ray is no longer feasible. So one has to limit such transport to smaller snakes, place them in a cloth sack, tie the nexk shut, put them inside a t-shirt, under a sweatshirt. Same trick, less convenient.
After clearing security one ducks into the head, pulls the bag out of one's shirt, puts said bag into the travel container and that into a carry on. Smuggling, it's not just a job, it's an adventure.
My sisters were glad to see the snake arrive. This was to replace the one we brought out the Christmas before I deployed. That one got way in somewise. It had adventures too. We drove cross-country with it. We had the fuel pump goes south in Nashville. The fuel pump is in the trunk. When they emptied the back seat to get at it (it's actually front of the gas tank) the mechanic saw the snake (all eight inches of him, big around as a pencil) and, we were told, had to be peeled off the ceiling. The grage owner laughed about it, as did the mechanic (all 6'3" and 250 lbs. of him) as did the guy who actually removed him, and took him into the office to watch.
Rhyannon (the youngest of my siblings) was doing something at church, so I tagged along. I have never been so appreciative of the silence of Quaker Meeting for Worship. The local UU put on a show. A more confused, poorly executed, handling of a decent subject I hope to never see.
The second hymn pretty much summed it up. Based on an mediaeval french carol, hamronised by Dupré and with words by someone names Hamson, it has promise. Tempo was 84. Performane was somehere around 60. That's funeral tempo. On Easter, the most joyous day of the year, they were singing a dirge.
The episoidic presentation of the story of Persephone followed the same vein. Joy killed by plodding. I had my doubts when I saw the architecture. The pillars rose past a false ceiling. Said ceiling was pitched. Paralelling the pitch was a set of buttresses, only they didn't. They ended in open point before they hit the top. Yes, a freestanding cantilever does provide support, but visually one needed a leap of faith to believe the roof wasn't going to come tumbling down. Perhaps this is why the singing is so subdued.
I did get to see my step-mother, and her parents (my fatehr and she are now divorced) so the morning wasn't a complete wash.
On the down side, my laptop decided yesterday that the screen is dying. I was going to get a desktop, for more dedicated image crunching, but now it looks as though I'll get a new laptop, and put this one on a docking station and convert it to a desktop.
It did, however, remind me to back it up.
I despair of ever getting through a TSA checkpoint without something of mine being questioned. SFO has signs saying one need not remove one's shoes, but they insisted everyone do so. Having seen, more than one, the abuse of cheap authority by TSA, I didn't even try to point to the signs. They swabbed both my camera bag, and my shoes. Burbank ran my pocket watch through the x-ray three times.
On the other hand, the snake went unnoticed. It's not illegal to carry a snake aboard a plane, but even before idjots starting making movies about it, it was problematic, because not everyone in the chain of gatekeepers knows the rules... see above about petty power; so when taking one to someone the easiest way to do it used to be to put it in a small box, put that box in one's jacket and walk through the metal detecto. That, because one much put one's jacket through the x-ray is no longer feasible. So one has to limit such transport to smaller snakes, place them in a cloth sack, tie the nexk shut, put them inside a t-shirt, under a sweatshirt. Same trick, less convenient.
After clearing security one ducks into the head, pulls the bag out of one's shirt, puts said bag into the travel container and that into a carry on. Smuggling, it's not just a job, it's an adventure.
My sisters were glad to see the snake arrive. This was to replace the one we brought out the Christmas before I deployed. That one got way in somewise. It had adventures too. We drove cross-country with it. We had the fuel pump goes south in Nashville. The fuel pump is in the trunk. When they emptied the back seat to get at it (it's actually front of the gas tank) the mechanic saw the snake (all eight inches of him, big around as a pencil) and, we were told, had to be peeled off the ceiling. The grage owner laughed about it, as did the mechanic (all 6'3" and 250 lbs. of him) as did the guy who actually removed him, and took him into the office to watch.
Rhyannon (the youngest of my siblings) was doing something at church, so I tagged along. I have never been so appreciative of the silence of Quaker Meeting for Worship. The local UU put on a show. A more confused, poorly executed, handling of a decent subject I hope to never see.
The second hymn pretty much summed it up. Based on an mediaeval french carol, hamronised by Dupré and with words by someone names Hamson, it has promise. Tempo was 84. Performane was somehere around 60. That's funeral tempo. On Easter, the most joyous day of the year, they were singing a dirge.
The episoidic presentation of the story of Persephone followed the same vein. Joy killed by plodding. I had my doubts when I saw the architecture. The pillars rose past a false ceiling. Said ceiling was pitched. Paralelling the pitch was a set of buttresses, only they didn't. They ended in open point before they hit the top. Yes, a freestanding cantilever does provide support, but visually one needed a leap of faith to believe the roof wasn't going to come tumbling down. Perhaps this is why the singing is so subdued.
I did get to see my step-mother, and her parents (my fatehr and she are now divorced) so the morning wasn't a complete wash.
On the down side, my laptop decided yesterday that the screen is dying. I was going to get a desktop, for more dedicated image crunching, but now it looks as though I'll get a new laptop, and put this one on a docking station and convert it to a desktop.
It did, however, remind me to back it up.
