This journal is painfully long, and more for documentation than to actually be read by another human being.

After taking several days of vacation from work, I ended up with a vacation that happened to span the 22nd to the 2nd. Not having had a vacation that long since, well, I came up here I pounced on the chance.

Up until the 26th, (e:inscrutable) and I lodged at her parents' house in Dansville. It was a restful stay in a country setting. I got to spend the first christmas in quite a while where I actually interacted with people instead of barricading myself in my apartment like a recluse.

The 28th, (e:inscrutable) and I took a flight to back home (what I consider to be my real home) in NC. Our flight was scheduled to leave at 7:30AM, and we had budgeted an hour to go through security, but alas, there was nearly a two-hour wait to go through security. At 6:30 in the freaking morning! So we had to rebook to a flight that left Buffalo at 5:30PM, and this time we decided to be safe and arrive at the Buffalo airport three hours early. And of course, there was no line in security at 2:30PM, so we ended up waiting three hours at the airport.

The funny part about going through the wretched process that cost us our flight was that they held onto my backpack for two minutes and searched it thoroughly because it had a container of sunscreen that I had forgotten to remove from Allentown Arts Festival six months earlier. Yet they totally missed the butane lighter in plain view sitting in the outer mesh of my backup (also accidently left there many months ago), something actually capable of damaging the plane during flight. Go figure.

During the whole experience with the plane, I mused repeatedly about the reactionary policy regarding air safety. Anythings okay to bring onto a plane, until someone tries to do something evil with it, at which point it's banned from any carry-on. Like the powers that be just couldn't have figured out earlier that you could mix harmless chemicals that could pass through an explosives sniffer together to form an explosive? And then there's the whole shoe thing. Richard Reid tries to blow up an airplane by hiding stuff in his shoe, and now we have to take our shoes off at security, and the only reason why we have to do that is that he tried to do this using his shoes. If he had hid the stuff in a stuffed animal, we'd still be able to wear our shoes through security and would get flogged by security if we dared to carry a Tickle-Me-Elmo past the TSA goons. It's so reactionary.

It's only a matter of time before some Al-Qaeda nutjob hides a bomb up his ass, and when he's caught trying to light his ass on fire at 36,000ft, airport screenings will be considerably more uncomfortable.

Friday I went to a Hurricanes game with my parents and (e:inscrutable) and got to see a Hurricanes game. We beat the Bruins 4-3. After living in Buffalo for almost two years, it was good to see an ocean of red and black jerseys. And of course, I got to purchase more Hurricanes schwag, which I really can't do in Buffalo.




Tonight, I hung out with a good high school friend and got to play with his kid, who's very cute. The racecar I bought him was a resounding success. I might be meeting with this friend again to hash out some ideas for the software I'm writing for him to keep track of computer network addresses. I'm not allowed to do work stuff on this vacation, but I guess altruistic stuff is okay.