TSA Starts Trip Poorly

We both got flagged by the security machine at the Anchorage airport.  I got a very intimate patting down.  "I have nothing in my pockets"  "You're wearing Levis.  The keep you warm and the machine detects heat."  J got the same treatment.  But she got a second one as well.  Here's my wife the terrorist.

Really, how many 70+ year old American women terrorists have there been in the US?  Ones who have a record of recently flying fairly frequently without incident and have round trip tickets, etc. 

There are at least two ways of detecting terrorists:  One is to examine the person - find out if there is anything in their background or behavior that suggests a problem that needs more attention.  That's not what all these airport detectors do.  They examine based on the machine.  They told me when I pointed out that my wife was a very unlikely suspect that "if the alarm goes off, we have to exam."   

This really does feel a lot like theater.  Somewhere there has to be a happy medium between ethnic profiling and terrorist profiling.  How much time and money does TSA spend on people who have .00001 chance of being a terrorist?   I'm sure they have detected plenty of guns with the machines, thrown away lots of pricy water bottles, and someone has sold a lot of scanning machines.  

(I checked.  There seem to be a fair number of companies making money of this theater. ) 

But once we were in the air, life looked better.

The fresh snow on the Chugach looked magical.  

And the Olympic Range was poking out of the clouds as we neared Seattle.  So was Ranier.

If you look closely, there's an airplane to the right of the mountain against the clouds.  

And walking my granddaughter to school we passed this tree with all its leaves in an almost perfect circle below it.  

The school is really wonderful.  It's part of the public school system, but like Stellar and Polaris in Anchorage, it requires a lot of parental volunteer work.  There's grades 1-6 in two large connected and non-institutional classrooms.  Here's a part.  

Every child should have access to a place like this.  I stayed about 15 minutes.  All the kids had stuff to do and were working quietly.  My granddaughter was writing in her journal.  Then they had a small meeting where they talked about empathy.  And about lice - it's that season.  

Later, after school, we went for a walk through the woods while she was having a music lesson.

There's lots of other things to write about, but I've been busy.