Ninety-nine point nine fahrenheit degrees

My weather app thingie is confusing the 45 degrees outside at the ATL airport with actually nice weather.

In the airport with J, flying to Vermont, to drive back down to Atlanta. We're looking to visit a couple national parks on the way back, albeit briefly, including Shenandoah, and Great Smoky Mountains. Whee road trip!

The TSA agents were dumbasses as always. When they also irritate J, that really says something. 

And a lovely window view

As i explained to J earlier this month after our visit to the (awesome) Pima Air and Space Museum, and while standing at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, I'm not a *true* plane geek, in the sense that I can't tell a plane by its jet trails. But i do enjoy some plane-spotting.

Fancypantsy Steakhouse* Valentines Day Dinner

Look, just 'cause we don't do gifts doesn't mean I can't make J a fancypantsy steakhouse* dinner for Valentines Day.

(*Vegan, of course.)

Here are the plates. Clockwise, from the top of the lower plate: grilled marinated tofu "steaks", "creamed" spinach, caramelized onions, and in the center, fresh tomato salad with organic julienned basil from our herb garden. And a dessert wine. Yeah, for dinner: we're sophisticated like that. (Which is clearly further shown in the bottom of the image, by J dressing up for dinner in her very fancypantsy painting scrubs.)

We apparently liked the food. This is after seconds for both of us.

I have to say I didn't like the creamed spinach as much as some past recipes I've made, but it was still pretty good, and J liked it. It was a little sweet for me from the soy milk (I used plain, but next time will go get some unsweetened.)

And here are another couple random things I've been making lately. On the right is a big ol' jar of homemade sauerkraut, which turned out delicious. And on the left, cayenne infused olive oil, with cayenne peppers from my friend L's farm in Kentucky.

Here is some of the sauerkraut plated, along with a tempeh breakfast wrap, the likes of which TSA is so concerned about. We initially feared it would taste strongly of anise, which the mason jar a friend gave us smelled heavily of, but it's actually just a tiny little hint. J's sister A (ummm, let's make her A3) liked it, and a little more biased, I think it's fantastic.

I'm going to continue experimenting with fermenting foods, in part using a recent purchased book I'm very excited about: Wild fermentation: the flavor, nutrition, and craft of live-culture foods, by Sandor Katz. I'd really like to make the red miso on p.60, but am not at all sure I have the patience (or pantry space) to wait out a full year of fermentation. For comparison, the sauerkraut fermented in the mason jar on the counter for about three weeks before I liked the flavor well enough to put it in the fridge.

Saccaminnow bound

Okay, at the airport, and once again thinking the annual 50k miles I spend on Sky Club access is worth every penny. If nothing else, dear readers, it provides free wifi for me to blog. I know, tantalizing, right?

First: the TSA Pre Check program is pretty damn nice: to be able to walk through security without taking out my stupid 3-1-1 compliant toiletries, leave my shoes on, leave my laptop in my bag. OH, WAIT: that's what it was before all of this ridiculous security theatre. Okay, neeeeeext...

 The Atlanta airport has a pretty nice Atlanta history installation going in in the pedestrian walkway between the B and C terminals. As many of you know, I'm a big fan of history museums, and this stuff is pretty solid. That said, it sort of pretty paints some of the uglier parts of Atlanta history, e.g., highlighting the 1996 Olympics without mentioning Christian Right terrorist Eric Robert Rudolph's bombing in Centennial Olympic Park that killed two and injured 111, and doesn't bother to even mention a formative part of Atlanta history, the 1906 Atlanta Race Riots.

But actually, one of my main gripes is that it puts an ellipsis my favorite part of my favorite Atlanta quote:

The complete quote: 

South of the North, yet north of the South, lies the City of a Hundred Hills, peering out from the shadows of the past into the promise of the future.

 -- W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, Chapter 5: Of The Wings of Atlanta

In other news, here is what an angle grinder and set of cheap bolt cutters can do with a little time an initiative. No, I'm not a bike thief. But my plane is about to take off, so more later.

TSA = incompetent asshats

I know, I know: what y'all really want to hear about is my vegan sky club breakfast:
From top left, that's a screwdriver, a half-caf "espresso", and my spork from home in oatmeal with raisins in a compostable, 100% recycled cup. No indication that composting is available in the sky club, nor the amount of post-consumer content in the 100% recycled cup.

But I digress. As the title indicates, I mostly want to rant a little about how incompetent TSA is. Now, my rather dim opinion of TSA is known to readers of this blog. But they really outdid themselves at ATL this morning.

First off, the guy at the xray monitor: totally amateur hour. At least the slow, incompetent guy at Las Vegas the other day was clearly a trainee. This guy was, apparently from his uniform, an actual TSA "agent." I literally stood to wait to push my bags through the belt while he examined the monitor for several full minutes. To the point where I was laughing. To the point where the TSA agent at the metal detector was looking around uncomfortably, knowing this dumbass was holding up the line. To the point where they decided (not uncoincidentally, I think) to shut down the p*nis machine, aka millimeter wave scanner, because they had to dedicate all available agents on that lane to doing secondary screenings the dude on the monitor asked for.

Okay, so I finally get to get through, and stand there and watch while he looks all curious like at the monitor with my one carryon. He tries repeatedly to draw outline boxes with his mouse around the two danger areas: my sunglasses (which I've taken through, ummm, lemme see, EVERY SINGLE GODDAMN FLIGHT I'VE BEEN ON SINCE AT LEAST 2004) and my breakfast wrap. Yep: my tortilla with tempeh, caramelized onions, green beans, garlic, and vegan cheese. This very suspicious looking thing:

Okay, it's wrapped up in tin foil. One sheet. Like, ummm, I dunno, about FIFTY similar wraps I've taken through TSA in the last several years.

Okay, so he pulls the bag over to the secondary screening conveyor. Conveyors do not convey. I stand there for literally about 60 seconds looking at my bag, and finally ask if I can get it screened. The two nasty TSA agents in the next station literally yell at me: ONE AT A TIME! Oh, oops: there is a backup of THREE people needing secondary screening and explosives testing at my lane.

Okay, so I wait another several minutes. My line has... stopped. Nobody is going anywhere.

Finally it's my turn to get screened, and the guy goes through my bag. Asks about the sunglasses. Opens up the case, but not the bag they are in. Okay, fine. Asks about the wrap. "A breakfast wrap", I tell him. Okay, I just need to screen this for explosives. Ummm, sure. He screens it for explosives. AND IT TURNS UP WITH A POSITIVE RESULT.

So now this is getting fun. I actually am about to get the dreaded invasive patdown. They have to go through every single thing in my (rather innocuous, except for a shitload of vegan snacks, and an allegedly explosive breakfast wrap) carryon bag. Which is, incidentally, a Mountainsmith Day Pack which most of you who know me have seen before. No suitcase (I checked it), my liquids all properly compliant with that sillyass 3-1 rule, my laptop out, my shoes off. Oh, but they have to run my shoes again. 'Cause the first time wasn't enough, 'cause my breakfast wrap came up positive for explosives.

So the poor TSA agent at secondary, who I'm actually beginning to feel somewhat bad for, has to launch in a long, detailed explanation of all the places he's going to put his hands on my body. I actually needed a clarification when he got to the point of where his hands will be in my crotch: he mumbled, and I was genuinely interested. (No, he wasn't that cute, I just wanted to know what kind of fun time I was about to have.) He mumbled it again, but now I was pretty sure he'd referred to the top of my crotch as my "isthmus."

An isthmus, for those of you who are wondering, is "a narrow strip of land connecting two larger land areas usually with waterforms on either side." Thanks, wikipedia. Confidential to TSA: you should let your agents read wikipedia at work.

As he was explaining what he was about to do, and I'm openly laughing at the notion that my breakfast wrap tested positive for explosives, he's trying to show me through his body language and tone that he agrees it's kind of silly. He said something to the effect of "just so you know, this isn't my favorite part of the job." Yeah, pal: me, neither.

He has to call a supervisor over, who re-asks me all the same stupid questions he has already asked. Yes, it's a FUCKING BREAKFAST BURRITO. I told them they were welcome to open it up, or I'd be happy to open it up for them. I explained each of the ingredients in it, and started to go into detail about the cooking methods. The supervisor got a little nasty with me, so I asked her if she was hungry, and told her I'd share.

Anyway, the patdown was relatively uneventful. He tickled my armpits a little, and did, indeed, get marginally up into my "isthmus" but didn't actually grope me. And was very consciously and carefully (para)-professional about it. And slooooooooow. The whole fandango took about 15 minutes. Literally.

Yes, friends, that is, along with a pre-flight screwdriver in the Sky Club, why I try to get to the airport at least two hours early. So I have plenty of time to be fondled by TSA, whose stupidass machine says my breakfast wrap has explosive residue on it.

The TSA masseuse actually told me, sincerely, to have a safe flight when he was done. I thanked him. It's sort of not his fault that he works for a BUNCH OF FUCKING IDIOTS.

Fucking idiots. Fucking shitass equipment. Fucking ridiculous security theatre nonsense foolishness.

On now to Philadelphia, for which my flight is delayed due to ground holds. Gonna be a rainy couple of days.

Snakes on a Plane

Or at least snakes disguised as human beings. I really need to try to avoid the ATL-SLC flights on Delta that have a customer base on par with Greyhound at 1am in the back when there was a stop within sprinting distance of a liquor store earlier in the evening. (Yes, I've been down that road. More than once. But fewer times than, ahem, at least one reader of this blog.)

I fly a lot, and have seen people try to stuff some silly things into overhead bins, but some of these people took the cake. One guy had a 24” or 26” rollaboard that extended in width so that it was about twice as wide as a standard rollaboard, and waaaay too long to fit in wheels first. He seemed mystified when the laws of physics didn't bend to his superior will or repeated bin door slamming (which the flight attendant nicely told him wasn't gong to work.) He ultimately managed to find an empty bin and, no kidding, filled nearly the entire thing with it. I really thought he might break the plastic of the top part of the overhead bin.

Then about five more people got on with almost equally obnoxious “carryon” luggage, and appeared hurt and saddened that the plane couldn't accommodate them. All the while, everyone is ignoring the “please don't put your jackets in the overhead bins until everyone has their luggage in” requests. These are not small overheads: this is a 757-200, and the bins have been extended. My standard sized 22” rollaboard fit easily, wheels first.

The guy sitting in the middle seat next to me sits down, plops down his HMS Host Bag O' Crap, immediately bogarts the entire armrest, and whips out his cellphone. He starts loudly complaining about how bummed he is that he didn't get an upgrade (which are complimentary, in order of elite status, fare class, and various other mysterious factors) because “I really have a ton of work to do.” He spent the 3.5 hour flight sleeping, flipping through a magazine, and eating his sandwich (a turkey club from Au Bon Pain, which he vigorously tore apart, plucking out the bacon and dropping it onto the wrapper from perilous heights. This causes little blobs of unidentifiable sauce to fly toward the guy in the window seat who, for better or worse, was too engrossed in his thick library juvenile collection fantasy novel, which he read quietly while moving his mouth to the words, to notice.

(BREAKING NEWS: From the cubicle in the Delta Sky Club immediately across from me, the woman yelling into her cell phone: “He has done some nice crowns in my mouth. But this particular problem wasn't addressed. It's been growing on me [loud cackling laughter.] [pause] And I'm not that nervous in a chair, and a couple of Advil will take care of anything I imagine. Ha ha ha. Okay, a small handful, maybe.”)

Back to the snakes.

Then the guy immediately in front of me needs to grill the flight attendant on where the power supplies are. She points it out, and he says “no, that's a USB supply, and this (shaking the in-flight magazine, that fount of accuracy and value) says that this plane has in-seat power in some rows. I want to know what those rows are.” He insists that he would have chosen a seat with a power supply if he knew. Now, bear in mind that Delta operates about ELEVEN different configurations versions of the 757, including former Northwest 757s, and even former TWA 757s. And if this idiot and his idiot companion got to pre-select exit row seating, they damn well fly enough to know that there are lots and lots of Delta 757s. The flight attendant is exceedingly pleasant about this idiot line of questioning, looks at the in-flight magazine, and ultimately asks EVERY other flight attendant on the plane. When she returns with various answers (such as that first class has power outlets at every row) the kind, polite answer “well, I asked every other flight attendant, we just don't know.” And Mr. Asshat responds, with a bizarre note of triumph in his voice: “Well, finally: that's one of two answers I find acceptable. The other one is where the power outlet is.”

Bear in mind this all goes down before the boarding door is even closed.

I need a drink.

Things I like about the Atlanta airport

Since I usually bitch and moan and snark about the airport, I thought I'd list a few things that I actually like about the ATL airport:

1) MARTA rail goes directly to it.
2) The security checkpoints, especially the South security checkpoint, are rarely crowded.
3) The various employees are usually quite friendly.
4) You can walk from terminal to terminal in an underground tunnel and skip the air train.
5) When you walk in the tunnel in #4, there is interesting art and sculpture from Zimbabwe.
6) There are two good vegan/vegetarian options in the Terminal A food court (Great Wraps has a surprisingly good and inexpensive ($5.55 all in) hummus & falafel wrap, and the Chinese place next to it has spicy tofu, and vegetarian fried rice.)
7) When you sit at the bar-style seating in the Terminal A food court, there is great people watching as people go to and from the air train.
8) Most of the people in #7 look and wander like zombies, which will make for good material if I ever write a short story about the airport.

See? I can be positive!

Off to DC now for museums, hiking, and beer. Woo!

Panorama!

Per A's suggestion, I tried shooting a panoramic view from our balcony. The first attempt, a week or so ago, didn't have nearly enough points for the software (autopanog) to map between the images, so I took another set.

Here is the version shot using a standard horizontal orientation, which shows a 180 degree panorama from the balcony:

Unfortunately, as you see, the horizontal approach forces me to crop off the tops of the nearby buildings.

But for some reason, the vertical approach didn't do the exposure blending correctly, so I need to keep working on it.

Back from Spain, and better living through pharmeceuticals

After an 11 hour* plane trip yesterday, got back and had delicious spicy peanut noodles with tofu, green onions and cilantro with J, and soon went to sleep. Well, after a week of being jet-lagged and generally sleeping poorly in Barcelona (which might also have had something to do with other guests in the hostal coming in from clubs through the wee hours of the morning) I took 2/3 of a melatonin before going to sleep, and got a good night's sleep for the first time since I left North America.

*11 hour plane trip? That sounds really long, right? Well, a bozo in business class (essentially first class since it was a two-class 767 ) decided as we began to taxi for takeoff that his tum-tum hurt. So the flight attendants called for doctors, and and Totally Inappropriately, announced the reason why they needed a doctor ("really bad stomach cramps.") Two guys, ostensibly doctors, wandered up from coach to business class, and after about ten minutes, the decision was made to go back to the gate. And get the idiot off. And then wait for his checked baggage to found and pulled off. And then wait for "1300 pounds" of fuel to top us off (which seems like an immense amount of fuel for taxi, but whatever.) (And here is what going down the google rabbithole can do: a cautionary tale about switching between the imperial and metric systems.)

So we finally got back into queue for takeoff about an hour late, and got up into the air. In the air:

* Four Christmases was surprisingly funny for much of it, until it turned into a stupid, formulaic romcom in the last 15 minutes.

* Four returning LDS missionaries were on the flight. First amusing thing was when one of the flights attendants (cue up Total Inappropriateness, Round 2!) just assumed that they were continuing on to Salt Lake City (they weren't, but the hyper-aggressive niceness of the LDS missionary caused them to be, well, really nice about it.) Then as Four Christmases cranked up, you could visibly see one of the two male missionaries get quite wide-eyed at the somewhat edgy pickup and sex scene in the very beginning, and the other look totally mystified.

* The plane was only about 1/3 full in coach, so people were playing musical seats most of the flight, which got surprisingly irritating. But I had a two-seat wide exit row to myself, so I can't really complain about the people who were stuffed into prison cells of Delta's 767 coach configuration needing to move. J and I flew to Belgium a couple years ago on a Delta 767 in coach, and I swore never again. I apparently forgot this when I booked the Barcelona trip, but the exit row made it totally tolerable.

More observations and some images to come: this post is already getting really long.

Various & random airport observations

Sitting in a lovely Delta sky club in A: it's the secret one in the center (find the Chili's Too), not the consistently crowded one near A17. Great views but limited electricity in the northernmost part.

Well, this little room was great, if you can ignore the CNN Headline Noise in the adjacent room. Then Team Idiot rolled in and began babbling. Two women, one prattling away into her cell phone, another texting while shoveling in a bagel with cream cheese and trying to ignore guy in his 20s. Guy in his ~60s is visibly and audibly drunk at 8:36am, and working on a(nother) bloody mary and his cell phone.

Just watched a pretty shabby looking MD88 roll out of the nearest gate: from up here on the 2nd/2rd floor, you could see that it's been a while since they re-painted it.

Waiting on a flight to JFK en route to BOS for a some G time. Big times to come!

Delta baggage truck (one of those bizarrely cute Tug vehicles) just ran the baggage trailer over an orange cone and looked back, obviously surprised. (UPDATE: about 10 minutes later: a delta trash truck nailed one of the orange cones that a Delta poop truck (aka "lavatory waste") had just put down, about 50 feet from the first sad cone.)

On the MARTA train coming down here, there were at least three sets of identical twins, two of sets apparently going to the same expensive private school. One girl had both a iPhone/iTouch, and an iPod, and was working both of them while doing some sort of homework balanced on a Chinese language textbook. Her sister was going over some fairly complicated math homework that she had gotten a 34/45 (i.e., a C, at 75%) on. The twin brothers seemed to be mostly concerned with laying all the way out on the benches, shoes up and all, though brother #2 was also interested in repeatedly blowing bubbles and getting them stuck all over his upper lip, the pulling it off with some significant effort and starting the process over again.

Okay, about time to begin packing up for some good times on the plane. Woo!

JFK

JFK: mediocre president, horrible airport.

JFK presidency: we canonize and lionize any president who is assassinated, and even those who just die. (Newsflash: all humans die. Being a dead president, or a dead pop singer, or any other flavor of public figure, doesn't make your death more tragic. There are, of course, degrees of difference. Johnny Cash and Kurt Vonnegut dying is considerably more of a loss than Michael Jackson.) Anyway, he was a philanderer who led the world to the brink of nuclear destruction and escalated the conflict in Vietnam.

His little brother dying a couple months ago was another excellent example of being way, way too star-obsessed with public figures. Yes, Ted Kennedy was a reasonably respectable senator. he did some good things. He also collaborated on No Child Left Behind, supported the invasion of Afghanistan, and generally compromised with the right wing any time it seemed politically expedient. Funny that in all the news coverage on Ted Kennedy's death, I literally heard the dreaded word "Chappaquiddick" mentioned once; I heard "Mary Jo Kopechne" zero. Those of you who know me, or at least know my politics from this blog, know that this is no right wing talk radio sort of rant. I just want us to stop this bizarre hero worship of deeply flawed people simply because they've died. I'm very proud to have gone to a college where, when they made the mistake of lowering the flag to half-mast when Nixon died, it was burned within hours.

On to the airport: my flight was first on time, then early, then delayed for mechanical for one hour, then delayed for 2.25 hours, and now one hour delayed. I'm going to check now.

The balm: one of the bartenders in the Delta Sky Club mixes a screamer of a mojito: mostly rum, with a splash of mojito mix and just a kiss of soda water. Yum.

People I don't understand

1) People who launch themselves out of their seats on the airplane, so they can occupy the aisle for the several minutes it takes the ground crew and flight crew to get the door open. Then it turns out the (specific jerk in question) needs to wait at planeside for his gate-checked bag to come out, just like the people he was jockeying to get in front of.

2) People who rush to the televisions in the airport to see the football game. (Confidential to football fans: the game won't change because you're watching it, and the ten minutes you see of grown men smashing into one another will be much more interesting without all the pap and filler when you watch it tomorrow on Sportscenter.)

3) People who don't tip, or even worse, tip badly. Examples: too numerous to mention. You know who you are.

4) Self-important TSA officers, who seem to think their scowl and facially insincere grunt of "how are you" somehow imparts some sort of gravitas or authority. Confidential to TSA: you're largely incompetent rentacops that 98% of the regular-traveling public despises. Oh, and suspiciously sneering at me when you look at the x-ray of my carryon isn't intimidating: it's just silly.

Boarding soon for segment five of nine in two weeks, so I should get my stuff together.

Insert: deep, loud, irritated sigh

The asshattery here in the LAX Delta Skyclub gets more intense by the minute. Not only does it sound like a junior high school cafeteria, both in volume and content, but this fucking nitwit is standing next to me, immediately in front of the "QUIET AREA" sign with a cell phone crossed out in a circle, with his cell phone plugged in right behind it, talking on it. There are literally dozens of electrical outlets spread throughout the room. Idiot.

Now the moron has left his cell phone plugged in while he wanders around. I'm tempted to pour my margarita on it, but the margarita tastes too good.

More calories, please

I decided that it's not really worth the walk to browse more overpriced food in other terminals, so I needed to get some more calories here. Fortunately, the bar makes a surprisingly good margarita. (Hey! It's almost noon, okay?)

Airports and etc.

After a frenzy to get packed and ready for the bike trip, I'm finally en route.

The morning flight from ATL to LAX was pleasant due to an upgrade, but unpleasant due to none of the reading lights working. The flight attendants were apologetic about this, but still didn't seem to think it worth leaving the overhead lights on, and the always helpful fellow passengers all closed their windows so they could watch The Fast and the Furious, and bad romcom. I got a little reading done until it started to really strain my eyes, and then I did some more eye-straining reading on my netbook.

Now in the Delta Skyclub in the crappy, run-down Terminal 5 at LAX. The lounge is nice enough, if quite crowded and loud. I'm actually listening to music (Gomez: Get Miles, appropriate in so many ways) which I almost never do in the airport or lounges. This is to drown out the woman who has been prattling nonstop with her companion since she came in. Well, not truly non-stop: she takes breaks to prattle loudly on her cell phone, too. All while she keeps her feet up on the chair. She's a teacher, but apparently hasn't learned Inside Voice.

The food at Delta Skyclubs pretty much always stinks, with a few exceptions (JFK terminal 2 has some really good snacks and appetizers at certain hours.) I'm hungry, and the food options in Terminal 5 mostly suck, so I was pleased to see them roll out a cart of food when they took away the breakfast foods. What was it? Some sort of caramel-fudge-flourless-chocolate cake thing. At 10:30 in the morning. Yes, really. My favorite response to this (well, the only response other than mine so far) came from a friend via e-mail: "turtle fudge cake? gross. i wouldn't eat that at any time of day."

It does appear that GrossCake(tm) is going to be the only option, so I'll be sticking with pretzels and beer. (Hey, it's now after 11!) I mean, c'mon: you can't even bring out some soft, wilted celery and carrots with grayish/white caking?

In other travel (news), my travels in the next month and a week will have me in the following airports: ATL, LAX, SLC, FCA, SMF, SFO, PIT, JFK, SEA. Woo.

Maybe I'll go hunt down better food, since I still have an hour and a half. A little web searching did indicate that it's possible to walk from Terminal 5 to Terminals 6, 7, and 8. Yay informationsuperinfobahn!