Here we go, into the wild blue yonder! Flying High into the sun!
This is going to be a long post as I have approximately 3 hours left on the flight before we land. The streams of thought will end either 20 minutes before landing in Seattle or when the battery dies (which is estimated to occur in 2 hours and 1 minute). Of course I have to disclaim that I’m not actually posting this during the flight; that would be against the rules! I’m just typing this up during the flight, in between bouts of solitaire and staring out the window at the little ant colonies down below. If there are any misspellings we can blame that on the kid behind me. What’s with kids on airplanes? Don’t they respect the universal rule of no kicking seatbacks and no playing “does gravity work the same on the seatback tray up at 34,000 feet as it did at 24,000 feet and 14,000 feet and 4,000 feet, and 0 feet”? Kids will be kids, or so they say. Maybe I’m just saving up karma for when we bring back our crew from the Philippines? They might have a run on the whole plane, especially if we pick up 3 in one stint! They'll be so stinkin' cute that no-one will offer up any resistance, right?
What can I say about the Minneapolis – St. Paul International airport besides the fact that it’s a good airport to fly to Manila from? We were tempted to take a right to access the international terminal. We have boarding passes to fly today; they’re universally accepted on all flights right? We could just hop on one to Manila! My parents would understand (wouldn’t you?) Per my coworkers we are already going to a foreign country …. Alaska. “You can see Russia from your house right”? Alaska isn’t quite a foreign country, technically, but don’t tell that to the citizens up there! Maybe that’s where I get my “foreign” accent, it’s really “Alaskan” (but that doesn’t explain the accent questions from fellow Alaskans). I also got teased a lot from coworkers this week on my choice to go someplace even colder than Minnesota over the winter break. Apparently that makes me crazy, or is it eccentric? Have I ever told you, my dear dear reader(s), my theory on crazy versus eccentric? I postulate that they are one in the same as far as mental (in)capacity, the difference is the amount of money you have. It you’re a person of little means and a bit of a kook then you’re crazy, if you’re a person of a lot of means and a bit of a kook then you’re eccentric. I know I’ll have “made it” (in terms of societal definitions) when I’m labeled as eccentric.
So, I digress. I was talking about the Minneapolis-St. Paul International airport. It’s a good airport, at least compared to most I’ve been to. It’s fairly easy to navigate (that they have two main terminals notwithstanding), has a good selection of activities (that the chocolate store was closed notwithstanding), and it has a good selection of restaurants (that they are all alcohol based notwithstanding). Unfortunately, though we frequented one of the restaurants I can’t say it was a worthwhile endeavor. More on that later, first I want to know what about being in an airport makes people want to drink? All of the restaurants seemed to be bars that served bar foods, what about goat stew? I didn’t find any of that!! Is flying really that scary that the only way to partake in it is to imbibe? Perhaps I’m biased as I don’t touch alcohol to start with (it’s expensive and it doesn’t taste good). The restaurant we were in had a special. Buy a beer and get a shot for three dollars. Yippee!! How about I save my money and give it to those less fortunate than I? In a roundabout way this brings me back to our restaurant experience. I think that we’re not very good customers for restaurants and hence for their employees (i.e. we're not high rollers). I like trying out new places to eat but I’m not a very high-margin client. I very rarely order appetizers, very rarely order anything to drink besides water (and never alcohol, which is a high profit item) and very rarely order anything for dessert. I don’t consider myself a restaurant scrooge, I just know what I like to spend money on and what I don’t. I give healthy tips but a 25% tip on a $30 dinner ($7.50) is less than a 10% tip on a $100 dinner ($10.00) I’m blessed to have a girl that is mostly the same on these items as I am! So, in the eyes of restaurant employees we’re not high priority. This was the case tonight. We couldn’t compete with those precious people at the bar ordering all of their fancy shots. We were kind of forgotten about. The food wasn’t that great either. It did fill our tummies but I want more goat!
After the ho-hum dining experience we went to the French Meadow Bakery in the airport. My coworker raves about their bread in their uptown location. We were beckoned in by some cookies and muffins. The display case highlighted glorious row after row of items that stick to your bones and only go away after running a couple of marathons. The question is, is it worth it? Is 5 minutes of muffinny bliss worth 5 hours of treadmill torture? I answer unequivocally YES! Ok, so it wasn’t ‘that’ exciting but it was good nonetheless. Amanda got a snickerdoodle cookie and I paid $3.49 for a “citrus poppy seed muffin”, not lemon poppy seed or orange poppy seed but “citrus”. Sort of like mystery meat but in a citrus muffin context. It was tasty, I don’t know what the “citrus” was but it might be worthwhile to try some muffin experiments with grapefruit. I like grapefruit. It makes my taste buds smile (after I spend 20 minutes peeling off the pith). I also like mango, especially in shake format, which makes me wonder if when we get back to the Minneapolis–St. Paul International airport we can hop onto a flight to somewhere in south-east Asia? I wonder if airports are kind of like movie theaters, once you get past security you can enjoy multiple flights just like you enjoy multiple movies (even though you’re not technically supposed to …. Not that I’m admitting any guilt). Sorry, I don’t want to be home just yet and I haven’t passed back through security, so I’ll just mosey on down to flight 777 to Bangkok!
We received a little packet of snacks on the plane as they no longer serve real food (though who really complains about that? I don’t particularly remember people raving about airplane food before!) I do remember as a kid that Alaska Airlines had a partnership with both Pizza Hut and Haagen Dazs Ice Cream. We would each get a personal pizza and a Haagen Dazs bar, collectively 100 miles on the treadmill, good thing I ate 20 of them as a kid (overall, not in one sitting), I’m still working them off! The snacks on today’s flight are “Baja Snack Mix”, after about 5 bites I can officially say "yuck". I remember when we were taking an intra-country flight from Manila to Virac and we had a snack mix, reminded me somewhat of Funyuns. As I’ve mentioned a couple of times in various posts, I’m game to try new food. Those funyunesque snacks were interesting, somewhat tasty, and I’d choose to eat them over this “Baja Snack Mix”.
Ha, I now have 2:09 minutes left on the battery (after 40 minutes of typing I have gained 8 minutes of battery time!) The computer must be enjoying these eccentric crazy ramblings.
People are funny. People are predictable (except me of course). For better or for worse people are people. When the gates were being prepared for letting people onto the plane the agents first took those who physically needed more time, perfectly fine. The agents then took families with young children, again perfectly fine. When the crowd (mob?) saw that their time was soon upon them they collectively starting slinking, oozing, toward the small opening that is the gate. Like moths to a fire they swarmed in. It was funny. I think that people don’t like to be left out and don’t like to let anyone get ahead of them.
Oh, hi little girl’s arm reaching around the chair…. Karma point, yay!!
I’m already up to 1400 words, wait, 1405 words, wait, 1409 words … wait! I can’t catch up! Sort of like I will always be older than Amanda. She can’t catch up. This is glorious when I decide (I had "we decide" but then she edited it) that we each get one point for our age when making decisions. I currently get 30 voting points and she gets 25 voting points. Perfectly fair. It’s very quantitative and seems to be better than most marriage point scales, namely that wife gets 1 voting point and husband gets 0. If Amanda would have been born first she’d have more voting points. In fact, come next summer she’ll get another voting point! Again I assert that this is a perfectly fair way to decide things. Amanda thinks that this system may be better if we based it on emotional age rather than physical age. I assert that this is much harder to quantify and hence won’t work. So, until I’m presented with a better system one voting point per year of our age.
When I was a kid I abhorred writing. When presented with creative writing or free writing time I would hide in a corner and write on my paper “I can’t think of anything, I can’t think of anything, I can’t think of anything” for the entire 20 minutes. I didn’t get much credit for it but in hindsight I think I ought to have claimed it was modern art. Business school did a number on my ability to write. The best thing I learned there was how to take two sentences worth of actual thought and expand that into a 20-page paper. Quantity over quality!! (If you’re still reading this posting at this point you are now saying “yes, it all makes sense now, this blog post is all about quantity over quality")
Last night we went over to our good friends Matt and Becky’s house to have our second Christmas. This year we get four Christmas’s. Our first one was on Monday night and was our personal Christmas. Our third one is tomorrow with my family in or near Russia. Our fourth one is on the 26th just south of Russia about 4 hours. We moved up to Minneapolis somewhat because of Matt and Becky. We really had intended to just come visit them one year and fell in love with the city instead. It took us a while to finally track down jobs here but it’s been a good move. Last night at Matt & Becky's I learned that “if you drink more milk and less root beer you’ll be healthy” from the 5-year old who was drinking milk while her dad was drinking root beer. I learned that 3-year olds are picky eaters. We made “midwestern” food (distinguishably different from “mideastern” food) in the form of crockpot pork chops and scalloped potatoes. We used the same recipe as we used last time we cooked for the crew and the 3-year old ate it up. This year the 3-year old informed us that she doesn’t like the “icky chicken” (I suppose that if you’re expecting chicken this would be “icky chicken”) or the "icky potatoes". We like playing board and card games with Matt and Becky, we have a friendly rivalry and are fairly evenly matched. This year they gave us a game called “whoonu”, from the makers of Cranium. This game caused me much consternation. This isn’t a game where strategy plays a big part. This isn’t a game where I can use quantitative concepts to figure out a best tactic. This is a game of figuring out likes and dislikes of the players. The game is played with flash-cards that had certain things written on them. Things like “The color red”, “breakfast in bed”, “The New York Yankees”. When you play with four players, one player is the “whoozit” (I know, sounds like a Dr. Seuss character), the other three players select two cards from their hand of four cards that they think the “whoozit” likes best. Without seeing who provided which card the “whoozit” then arranges the cards in order of preference. The player that provided the “whoozit’s” favorite card got 6 points, provider of the second favorite got 5 points, all the way down to 1 point for the least favorite. How can you game this system? The primary determinant of points is the luck you had in drawing cards. If I drew cards labeled “Onions”, “Treadmills”, “100 Degrees with Humidity”, and “Spiders” and had to pick two to have Amanda rank she’d all rank these as dead last. Poor Tom would lose (poor Tom did lose!). This is a decent party game in that you learn little details about your party mates. I learned that Matt doesn’t like high heels, that Becky doesn’t like musicals and that Amanda doesn’t like Elvis (what did you say?!) I think we all came out about even on the points scale at the end of the night. Even though this game lacked opportunity to model quantitatively I did manage to get one small (very small, minor really) measure of mathematics in it. I derived that the minimum winning score in one round (one round being everyone gets to be the “whoozit” once) was 21 points (total available points is 84, divide by 4 is 21). So, if you got less than 21 points in the round you lost!
Amanda has almost entirely abandoned playing games against me. My mind works in ways that seem to jive with game playing. We were invited over for Thanksgiving dinner by some friends of ours from Church and while we were winding down over pecan pie we played dominoes. I don’t know if we played “real” dominoes or not, all I’ve ever played before was line them up and push them over, but we played something! I learned after two hands how to minimize downside risk (the risk of holding a large hand) and to maximize upside potential. I wound up winning by having just about half the total score of the others (golf rules, low score wins). I watch “Wheel of Fortune” most nights to try and see if I can guess the last puzzle. I have about a 75% hit rate which causes Amanda to suggest that I should try out for the show. I’ve managed to understand that nowadays they try to put in tricky letter combinations into their puzzles, gives me a head start on solving them. I maintained a 20 year age (peak age) in BrainAge on Nintendo DS when we borrowed it and my Wii Mii is in his early 20’s for fitness (too bad that doesn’t translate over!) I don’t say this to boast. This is the first step in the Gamers Anonymous group I’m in. The second step is getting forgiveness from people I’ve hurt and forgiving myself. This “game” acumen does come at a cost. I don’t get to play many games against Amanda and when I lose “Wheel of Fortune” to a team of “purplhorses” ('e' left out on purpose) I get heckled. It also causes my baby brother to give me pointers on how to keep girlfriends around. When Amanda and I were dating we traveled down from Fairbanks to my parents’ house and were playing “Mario Kart” on Nintendo GameCube, I lapped her a couple of times causing my brother to state succinctly that even he knows that the guy should let the girl win. My poor kids will grow up tasting defeat while other kids will soundly beat their dads at Chess!
After my icecapade (instead of escapade) the other day I’ve decided that I like ice climbing! I purchased some boots and crampons from a climbing buddy of mine. He decided that he likes to rock climb much better than ice climb and having $ instead of ice climbing equipment made sense (or at least his wife decided that). So now I have big, giant, keep my feet snug-as-a-bug-in-a-rug, boots replete with big spiky teeth (which are sort of like dentures, you can put them in or pull them out). I’m taking these boots to Alaska with me (sans dentures as I don’t think security would have liked that too much) so that I can play play play in the snow! I hopped onto the treadmill wearing these suckers and immediately found that I couldn’t walk at my nice 3.8 mph pace. I had to start at 2 mph and it was “clunk clink clank” all the way. I did make it up to 2.9 mph by the end of the 2 total miles. They are certainly a different beast. I suspect treadmills aren’t the cushiony soft environment that these tough boots are looking to wade in. I’ll see how the boots treat me but maybe at the next REI sale I’ll find some cold-weather hiking boots and keep these ones for the climbing.
Speaking of security we had an odd experience today though I reckon it was odder for the next guy. We were in the main security line waiting to have our ID’s matched with our pretty little dimple laden faces and matched to our austere boarding passes when a TSA agent started chit chatting with the family behind us. He let us go through with nary a thought but had to ask them what they were doing, where they were going, the likes. The recipient of these inquiries were from somewhere in the middle east / India (I admit I am a little uncultured and probably wouldn’t always guess the correct origination of the people but I also didn’t get a good look and didn't want to gape with my jaw askew). After the TSA guy was done chatting/investigating the people behind us he came up with the same MO to us. Where are we going, what are we doing. I have no problem answering but it seemed to me (and to Amanda as well, I verified later) that he was simply chatting with us to “cover up” his profiling of the others. I don’t know if that was the actual intention or not but it seemed like it. An interesting question was posed by a member of our Church group that goes along the lines of profiling people. We’re not supposed to judge people, per the Bible, but we are given discernment. Where is this line? Where is the balance between discerning that the level of danger is ramped up by certain individuals while still not casting judgment? To put it into a context, two people are walking down the street, one is black and one is white. Which side of the street would you rather be walking on all else being equal? I think more people would choose to walk on the side with the white person? Are you discerning that the black person is more dangerous? Are you judging? Now how about if you were in a bad neighbood? Black Side? White Side? Discernment? Judging? Now how about if the same black person were wearing a business suit? Black side? White side? Discernment? Judging? It’s too bad there’s no way to identify the true nature of each individual just by sight, regardless of skin tone, dress, etc.
The battery is the limiting factor on this trip. If I’m lucky I’ll rejuice in Seattle then on to round two of this trek! Too bad I didn’t have my electronic journal for our trip to Manila back in 2006! We’ll have to take it the next time around, even if we don’t make it to the internet café to actually post, it’d be fun to have the memories written down (and it’d be fun to have a place to store the multitudes of pictures that we’ll take instead of having to run to a camera store in Mega Mall and ask if their flash memory card was compatible with US cameras!)
Battery go night night.
(Honk if you make it to the end)
