it's cold. and gray. and wintry. i love it. well, now that my heater is fixed and i have my heat dish i love it. we are supposed to get rain and high winds tonight. california doesn't get exciting weather too often, so it should be nice.

the government is once again using the 'war on terrorism' (which is just a silly statement to begin with. who/what/where is terrorism?) to pass ridiculous laws and regulations. sure, we'd all feel safer if every piece of baggage was checked. i know i laughed when i was one of the 'chosen' one third of the passengers to have their checked baggage searched flying home from new york. what about the other two-thirds? the airports now have sixty days to implement a program to search every bag. nevermind that there aren't enough baggage checking machines in existence, that there aren't enough trained employees to operate the non-existent machines and that the machine company has one year to upped their production. let's just make it happen faster.

watching the news last night, i heard an airline big wig (i forgot which one. my apologies) say that in order for all of the bags to be checked within the sixty day time frame, passengers may have to arrive up to 7 (that's seven. one more than six.) hours early. i know i have already discounted flying to southern california - it's a six hour drive. if i have to arrive at the airport three hours early, then an hour + flight, and another hour to be picked up at the airport and driven to my dad's house, it's just not worth it. imagine what having to arrive seven hours early will do?

why can't they just make regulations that make sense? and put funding behind them? in another arena, a few years back california decided that all lower grade classes must have less than 20 students. yet there was not funding to hire extra teachers, to build bigger schools, to buy more supplies. students were then taught by uncredentialed teachers in cramped classrooms. and that was better than having 25 kids in a classroom? argh. i hope they figure this whole thing out before i need to get on a plane to travel somewhere....

i'll get off my little soapbox now...and go bask in the bitter cold. (with my down jacket, of course)