or rather, in the sky again. I didn't stay out too late last night, I got home around 11:30 from dinner/drinks and finished packing. By that time, it was nearly 12:30 and I dropped off to sleep soon after that.

Canada's TSA equivalent (can't remember their acronym, CSTSA or something) did some right things and some wrong things. The line through security doubled back a few times, but it moved pretty smoothly, until I got there. No it wasn't me holding things up. :)

As I approached security, I took out my little mesh bag and put my watch, sunglasses, wallet, change, keys and belt in it and clipped it to my carry-on. As I got closer I untied my shoes and took my laptop out of it's case. I've done this before, and I always hate it when everybody else waits until they get right up to the security checkpoint and THEN starts going through their pockets and ridding themselves of the shit THEY KNEW THEY HAD ON THEM and KNEW THAT THEY'D HAVE TO STRIP IT OFF.

There was a family of three people ahead of me, a man and his elderly parents. English was not their first language (maybe the son's) and they were still stripping off bits and pieces as they approached the metal detector. I overheard the security jackasses telling people "it's ok, don't take your watch off" and "Your belt is ok". Then they go through the metal detector, it goes off and they have to get wand-searched and patted down. The mother went through first, and the girl waved her through to pick up her stuff. The mother didn't understand, so after waving her a second time, she held her arms out to be wanded so the security jackass wanded her... and found all kinds of things.. a belt, a coin in her pocket, a watch, glasses... each time she beeped, she had to stop, remove that piece and get wanded again. FINALLY she got through, and then it was the dad's turn. SAME DAMN THING. Wallet, watch, testicles & spectacles all had to get wanded. Plus he had a ciggy lighter in his pocket and when they took it away he got all agitated about it. I felt like throwing a loonie at him and saying GO BUY ANOTHER ONE WHEN YOU GET TO HOUSTON, YOU JACKASS. But it wouldn't have done any good, he wouldn't have understood me anyway.

As I boarded the aircraft, I saw that most of the first-class seats were empty. Goodie, I thought. Empty seats up front equal upgrades! w00t! Unfortunately, that wasn't the case on this leg. The upside is that I had an aisle seat and the flight wasn't full, so the seat in the middle of the row was empty. I ended up sitting next to a cute girl who worked on cruise ships, and there were six people who were headed to Miami to get on a cruise ship, so we all had stuff to talk about. I thought I heard them say they were going on a Royal Caribbean cruise, rather than a Carnival cruise and said "oh that's good. Those Carnival ships are floating trailer parks. They might as well paint the NASCAR logo on the smokestacks" and the girl (who worked on Holland America's boats) eyes got wide and gave me "the secret shut up signal". Oops.

Apparently she was a little nervous about turbulence. Flying was no problem, but turbulence made her a little nervous. I wish I had known that about six minutes earlier when, during the little safety dance video they showed, I made a comment about the lifejackets under the seats and said "Lifejackets? from Vancouver to Houston? If we go down, we're going down in the mountains!" D' oh!

So just to make matters worse (or funnier, if you're a sick bastard like me) the in-flight movie was $imdb(POSEIDON). The disaster flick about a cruise ship that gets rolled over by a huge rogue wave. I thought that was one of the funniest things I'd seen all week!