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Oy...
I don't know what it is lately, the weather or the whole grad school thing or the recent dire warnings about climate change (which bother me a lot), but I've been very anxious the past couple of days. It may also be because I'm not adjusting well from my Thanksgiving trip, in part because my little brother gave me a computer game that I've spent way too long playing. Because I'm playing it so much I have not been getting enough sleep, which has messed up some other things (like my willingness to exercise). I really need to cut down.
I've also been remiss in updating the journal and writing about my Florida trip.
I did write an entry after going through airport security in Philadelphia - one that I couldn't post because I didn't have online access at the time. I've decided not to present it in its entirety. Basically, I had to give up my shampoo, conditioner and special hair gel at security, because even though there were less than three ounches of each and they were in small bottles, the bottles were not small enough, and they were not marked. They were the kind you buy at a drugstore to put small amounts of your toiletries in from bigger bottles. My dad had neglected to tell me that you can only bring through three-ounce-or-smaller bottles: the amount of liquid itself is not relevant if the bottle is too big.
At the time I was very upset, in part because my hair won't cooperate at all without the special gel that I lost, but mostly because I felt humiliated by the whole process of giving up my stuff on a technicality. The worst part was when they had to take my purse aside for extra checking (swabbing it with a special little paper that they then put in a machine to scan for chemicals). The guy doing the swabbing pulled out a small tube of liquid lip gloss that I'd forgotten to put in the ol' quart bag. After what I'd just experienced with losing my hair stuff, I was afraid I would get in trouble. I didn't, though - the guy just put it back in. It was obviously smaller than three ounces, by the way, but between bureaucracy and the possible mood of the people working at security, you can't always tell what's going to happen. It was the first time I hadn't put my liquids in a checked bag since the new rules came into effect, so it was also the first time I'd experienced that kind of trouble. That whole episode felt like a taste of police state mentality, both on the part of the establishment and the poor ordinary folks who had to go through it.
I complained to my Dad (who was in the Baltimore airport with Mom and Benjamin) over my cell phone about the whole episode. He admitted that he should have been more specific when telling me about the liquid rules (although I admit that I should have checked more carefully), and said there are two reasons why the TSA does stuff like that: first, they're worried that a half-empty bottle of liquid would be good for mixing chemical components in to make bad stuff, if you had the components in separate bottles or if a buddy of yours had one component while you had the other. But the primary reason, which I suspected, is that the TSA is a very top-down organization, and screeners are expected to adhere to the letter of bureaucratic regulation. God forbid that they exercise their own judgement when it comes to their job, because they're paid to do it by the book.
Oh, I should probably explain why I was taking all my stuff in a carry-on. I was flying U.S. Airways out of Philadelphia, because it had the only nonstop service from there to Tampa (my parents made the reservation). As you may know, before U.S. Airways was bought out by America West (which, for some reason, then named itself after the loser in the buyout), the company had almost gone down for the third time. They'd severely cut back on their baggage-handling staff, so their record with checked baggage is, well, bad. They've actually required that people check their bags 45 minutes before departure to ensure that the bags get on the plane, a sign of how bad things are, although even then there are probably no guarantees, and it's not good to check in late in any case.
Here's a more general tip for you all: in spite of the TSA's draconian regulations regarding liquids in your carry-on baggage, it's best not to check bags if you can avoid it. Airports and airlines are having a big problem handling the sheer volume of luggage they must process every day, because the old sorting system, in which tagged bags move by on a conveyor belt and the tags are scanned by a fixed reader, is not very accurate. They end up having to sort thousands of pieces of luggage manually every day, which increases the risk of bags not getting to their destinations. RFID bag tags, which have worked well in Hong Kong and elsewhere, will help this situation a great deal - assuming they don't increase costs that get passed down to the customer, which might happen, because the airlines might use RFID tags as an excuse to bilk people. However, even with the RFID luggage tags, the human fuckup factor will still be pretty significant. Also, there's the problem of the TSA hand-searching checked bags. Technically the bag inspectors are supposed to be watched by a camera while they do their work, and they are supposed to take care not to damage everything. But consider: there are a number of suits against the TSA (Lord only knows if they'll go through) because in some cases there has been no camera, which has resulted in luggage pilfering on the part of the inspectors, or, more often, they have not closed a container of liquid properly after opening it to check its contents, thus leading to damage of bag contents. So, if you absolutely can't get everything into a carry-on bag, mail the rest to your destination ahead of time or use some kind of luggage service that will pick it up for you at your door and send it through some trusted carrier.
Hm, I spent longer on that than I intended. Well, I'll talk about the actual trip now.
First, I will say that my trip to Florida was not as bad as I thought it was going to be. Mom didn't pester me too much (although I kind of had to put my foot down to prevent that). Benjamin was somewhat annoying, but not too terrible. And since Granny made the hotel reservations, I got my own room instead of having to share one with a sibling or two, which was a great relief.
The trip wasn't as good as some previous trips have been, either. My Grumpy - that's what I call my maternal grandfather - has been slowly deteriorating for a while, although I don't think he's quite as bad as Granny complains that he is. After being married to her for all this time, I think he's just used to ignoring her when he can, which is why, for instance, he almost never puts in his hearing aids. He's also a quiet person by nature, and Granny isn't. She complains about him while he's present, but that's probably the story of their marriage. They do love each other, they just have a weird kind of dynamic.
Also, Granny used to take us out to a lot of places when we visited her, and a lot of different restaurants. But she hasn't been doing well herself. She's lost a lot of energy and can't walk long distances. So, for anything other than breakfast, we generally ate in the cafeteria at her assisted living community. The cafeteria is run sort of like a restaurant, but it's not quite decent-restaurant-quality, and I found the choices rather limited. We also ended up having our Thanksgiving dinner there: it was okay, since they had good stuff, but they don't do turkey like my Grandma,1 with whom my immediate family usually celebrates Thanksgiving. My mother's sister was also there. I've mentioned before that she's got OCD and some flavor of paranoid disorder, among other things. I haven't heard all of what's been going on with her, but what I did her made me a little nervous about having dinner with her.
That was actually okay. Since there were a lot of people at the table, Mom sat me down with my aunt because we both had something in common: we have pet cats and, given the opportunity, we will talk about them nonstop.2 I was a little mad because I felt she'd just decided it was the easiest way to deal with a troublesome relative - or, rather, have someone else deal with them - but that wasn't actually the case. My aunt is uncomfortable in large social gatherings (as am I), and we had the whole family plus some of Granny and Grumpy's friends at the table. So I guess my aunt felt better having someone nearby who she could easily speak to. And I don't know, maybe my mom can tell that for all my social awkwardness, I can talk one-on-one with almost any sort of person. My aunt was quite happy to talk with me about cats, and about the pumpkin cheesecake they served at the cafeteria.
The next day, Mom and I went to the local Fidelity office to try and get my stocks in order. See, I have some small shares of stock that were bought for me when I was little: these I'm giving to Bryn Mawr. I also have some kind of mutual fund and a couple of other thiings that I need to have de-custodialized so I can transfer and sell them. I want to take the money and start from the ground up with a Roth IRA and perhaps my own mutual fund. I want to start my Roth IRA before I'm 25, because if you start it while you're young and make regular, small contributions, you can have a million dollars in it by the time you retire. Since I take after my dad, I will probably be working at least part-time until they put me in the ground, but it's good to be prepared. I might also be able to use the money in the mutual fund for living expenses while I attend grad school (which would mean no new mutual fund, or a very small one), depending on how things go. By the way, I'm done with my applications, and I'm trying to figure out whether I should apply for financial aid before or after I get approved. I'm getting the impression that it's "after."
Another highlight of the trip was playing Super Munchkin with my brothers, even though I lost every time. I knew Benjamin would like it:Daniel seemed to like it a lot too, in spite of the fact that I messed up on a couple of the rules.
And the trip back home was not as bad as the trip up: I did okay with the liquids thing this time, and the screener looking at my bag commented on how glad he was that I'd followed the rules. Of course, this may have been because the woman before me was trying to go through with two 20oz bottles of drinking water. Then again, I don't know if I could blame her, because the terminal my plane left from had a lot of international flights, and you can't expect people form other countries to know all our stupid rules.
By the way, Philadelphia looks lovely when you're flying in or out at night.
1This would be my Dad's mother, who, unlike Granny, loved to cook. She has arthritis so she doesn't do it so much anymore, but for special occasions, she will still cook up a nice dinner.
2We also have certain character traits in common - so my mother says and so I have observed. I think my mother was afraid, and maybe still is, that I will end up like her sister, and sometimes I worry about that too. I haven't come out and said it to her, though. And really, I don't think that's going to happen. My aunt's issues cropped up at a young age, and while I have my own issues, they are not nearly as severe and I'm mostly working through them okay.
There have been three fairly significant events since I got back: first, my ADHD/Asperger's social skills class is over, so I can go back to knitting circle now. Through that class I also found out about a short evaluation study I can go through that will earn me $40. I need to ask if Penn has some central processing place for clinical or psych evaluation trials, because I could use the extra money. That reminds me, I have to buy some cards and gifts and the makings of holiday cookies. Oh, the second event is that I finished writing Perl scripts and procedures at work for a certain series of projects, so while the ones I've been doing before have taken a really long time (not good), the rest should take a lot less time, although they will still need some by-hand tweaking. I'm glad for that because so far the projects have been really frustrating and boring. The third event was my roomate's boyfriend bringing his eight-year-old daughter with him when he came to visit. While I don't like him too much, because he is not a good guest, his daughter is adorable. She really liked Roo and happily played my PS2 for a while. She's also quite smart: she reads very well and already has a handle on good eating habits (she is appalled by some other kids her age who constantly eat potato chips and have gotten very fat as a result). I don't normally like kids, but she is okay.
Wow, I babbled a lot. But I feel better for having written this all out.
I've also been remiss in updating the journal and writing about my Florida trip.
I did write an entry after going through airport security in Philadelphia - one that I couldn't post because I didn't have online access at the time. I've decided not to present it in its entirety. Basically, I had to give up my shampoo, conditioner and special hair gel at security, because even though there were less than three ounches of each and they were in small bottles, the bottles were not small enough, and they were not marked. They were the kind you buy at a drugstore to put small amounts of your toiletries in from bigger bottles. My dad had neglected to tell me that you can only bring through three-ounce-or-smaller bottles: the amount of liquid itself is not relevant if the bottle is too big.
At the time I was very upset, in part because my hair won't cooperate at all without the special gel that I lost, but mostly because I felt humiliated by the whole process of giving up my stuff on a technicality. The worst part was when they had to take my purse aside for extra checking (swabbing it with a special little paper that they then put in a machine to scan for chemicals). The guy doing the swabbing pulled out a small tube of liquid lip gloss that I'd forgotten to put in the ol' quart bag. After what I'd just experienced with losing my hair stuff, I was afraid I would get in trouble. I didn't, though - the guy just put it back in. It was obviously smaller than three ounces, by the way, but between bureaucracy and the possible mood of the people working at security, you can't always tell what's going to happen. It was the first time I hadn't put my liquids in a checked bag since the new rules came into effect, so it was also the first time I'd experienced that kind of trouble. That whole episode felt like a taste of police state mentality, both on the part of the establishment and the poor ordinary folks who had to go through it.
I complained to my Dad (who was in the Baltimore airport with Mom and Benjamin) over my cell phone about the whole episode. He admitted that he should have been more specific when telling me about the liquid rules (although I admit that I should have checked more carefully), and said there are two reasons why the TSA does stuff like that: first, they're worried that a half-empty bottle of liquid would be good for mixing chemical components in to make bad stuff, if you had the components in separate bottles or if a buddy of yours had one component while you had the other. But the primary reason, which I suspected, is that the TSA is a very top-down organization, and screeners are expected to adhere to the letter of bureaucratic regulation. God forbid that they exercise their own judgement when it comes to their job, because they're paid to do it by the book.
Oh, I should probably explain why I was taking all my stuff in a carry-on. I was flying U.S. Airways out of Philadelphia, because it had the only nonstop service from there to Tampa (my parents made the reservation). As you may know, before U.S. Airways was bought out by America West (which, for some reason, then named itself after the loser in the buyout), the company had almost gone down for the third time. They'd severely cut back on their baggage-handling staff, so their record with checked baggage is, well, bad. They've actually required that people check their bags 45 minutes before departure to ensure that the bags get on the plane, a sign of how bad things are, although even then there are probably no guarantees, and it's not good to check in late in any case.
Here's a more general tip for you all: in spite of the TSA's draconian regulations regarding liquids in your carry-on baggage, it's best not to check bags if you can avoid it. Airports and airlines are having a big problem handling the sheer volume of luggage they must process every day, because the old sorting system, in which tagged bags move by on a conveyor belt and the tags are scanned by a fixed reader, is not very accurate. They end up having to sort thousands of pieces of luggage manually every day, which increases the risk of bags not getting to their destinations. RFID bag tags, which have worked well in Hong Kong and elsewhere, will help this situation a great deal - assuming they don't increase costs that get passed down to the customer, which might happen, because the airlines might use RFID tags as an excuse to bilk people. However, even with the RFID luggage tags, the human fuckup factor will still be pretty significant. Also, there's the problem of the TSA hand-searching checked bags. Technically the bag inspectors are supposed to be watched by a camera while they do their work, and they are supposed to take care not to damage everything. But consider: there are a number of suits against the TSA (Lord only knows if they'll go through) because in some cases there has been no camera, which has resulted in luggage pilfering on the part of the inspectors, or, more often, they have not closed a container of liquid properly after opening it to check its contents, thus leading to damage of bag contents. So, if you absolutely can't get everything into a carry-on bag, mail the rest to your destination ahead of time or use some kind of luggage service that will pick it up for you at your door and send it through some trusted carrier.
Hm, I spent longer on that than I intended. Well, I'll talk about the actual trip now.
First, I will say that my trip to Florida was not as bad as I thought it was going to be. Mom didn't pester me too much (although I kind of had to put my foot down to prevent that). Benjamin was somewhat annoying, but not too terrible. And since Granny made the hotel reservations, I got my own room instead of having to share one with a sibling or two, which was a great relief.
The trip wasn't as good as some previous trips have been, either. My Grumpy - that's what I call my maternal grandfather - has been slowly deteriorating for a while, although I don't think he's quite as bad as Granny complains that he is. After being married to her for all this time, I think he's just used to ignoring her when he can, which is why, for instance, he almost never puts in his hearing aids. He's also a quiet person by nature, and Granny isn't. She complains about him while he's present, but that's probably the story of their marriage. They do love each other, they just have a weird kind of dynamic.
Also, Granny used to take us out to a lot of places when we visited her, and a lot of different restaurants. But she hasn't been doing well herself. She's lost a lot of energy and can't walk long distances. So, for anything other than breakfast, we generally ate in the cafeteria at her assisted living community. The cafeteria is run sort of like a restaurant, but it's not quite decent-restaurant-quality, and I found the choices rather limited. We also ended up having our Thanksgiving dinner there: it was okay, since they had good stuff, but they don't do turkey like my Grandma,1 with whom my immediate family usually celebrates Thanksgiving. My mother's sister was also there. I've mentioned before that she's got OCD and some flavor of paranoid disorder, among other things. I haven't heard all of what's been going on with her, but what I did her made me a little nervous about having dinner with her.
That was actually okay. Since there were a lot of people at the table, Mom sat me down with my aunt because we both had something in common: we have pet cats and, given the opportunity, we will talk about them nonstop.2 I was a little mad because I felt she'd just decided it was the easiest way to deal with a troublesome relative - or, rather, have someone else deal with them - but that wasn't actually the case. My aunt is uncomfortable in large social gatherings (as am I), and we had the whole family plus some of Granny and Grumpy's friends at the table. So I guess my aunt felt better having someone nearby who she could easily speak to. And I don't know, maybe my mom can tell that for all my social awkwardness, I can talk one-on-one with almost any sort of person. My aunt was quite happy to talk with me about cats, and about the pumpkin cheesecake they served at the cafeteria.
The next day, Mom and I went to the local Fidelity office to try and get my stocks in order. See, I have some small shares of stock that were bought for me when I was little: these I'm giving to Bryn Mawr. I also have some kind of mutual fund and a couple of other thiings that I need to have de-custodialized so I can transfer and sell them. I want to take the money and start from the ground up with a Roth IRA and perhaps my own mutual fund. I want to start my Roth IRA before I'm 25, because if you start it while you're young and make regular, small contributions, you can have a million dollars in it by the time you retire. Since I take after my dad, I will probably be working at least part-time until they put me in the ground, but it's good to be prepared. I might also be able to use the money in the mutual fund for living expenses while I attend grad school (which would mean no new mutual fund, or a very small one), depending on how things go. By the way, I'm done with my applications, and I'm trying to figure out whether I should apply for financial aid before or after I get approved. I'm getting the impression that it's "after."
Another highlight of the trip was playing Super Munchkin with my brothers, even though I lost every time. I knew Benjamin would like it:Daniel seemed to like it a lot too, in spite of the fact that I messed up on a couple of the rules.
And the trip back home was not as bad as the trip up: I did okay with the liquids thing this time, and the screener looking at my bag commented on how glad he was that I'd followed the rules. Of course, this may have been because the woman before me was trying to go through with two 20oz bottles of drinking water. Then again, I don't know if I could blame her, because the terminal my plane left from had a lot of international flights, and you can't expect people form other countries to know all our stupid rules.
By the way, Philadelphia looks lovely when you're flying in or out at night.
1This would be my Dad's mother, who, unlike Granny, loved to cook. She has arthritis so she doesn't do it so much anymore, but for special occasions, she will still cook up a nice dinner.
2We also have certain character traits in common - so my mother says and so I have observed. I think my mother was afraid, and maybe still is, that I will end up like her sister, and sometimes I worry about that too. I haven't come out and said it to her, though. And really, I don't think that's going to happen. My aunt's issues cropped up at a young age, and while I have my own issues, they are not nearly as severe and I'm mostly working through them okay.
There have been three fairly significant events since I got back: first, my ADHD/Asperger's social skills class is over, so I can go back to knitting circle now. Through that class I also found out about a short evaluation study I can go through that will earn me $40. I need to ask if Penn has some central processing place for clinical or psych evaluation trials, because I could use the extra money. That reminds me, I have to buy some cards and gifts and the makings of holiday cookies. Oh, the second event is that I finished writing Perl scripts and procedures at work for a certain series of projects, so while the ones I've been doing before have taken a really long time (not good), the rest should take a lot less time, although they will still need some by-hand tweaking. I'm glad for that because so far the projects have been really frustrating and boring. The third event was my roomate's boyfriend bringing his eight-year-old daughter with him when he came to visit. While I don't like him too much, because he is not a good guest, his daughter is adorable. She really liked Roo and happily played my PS2 for a while. She's also quite smart: she reads very well and already has a handle on good eating habits (she is appalled by some other kids her age who constantly eat potato chips and have gotten very fat as a result). I don't normally like kids, but she is okay.
Wow, I babbled a lot. But I feel better for having written this all out.