We're now min-eh-SOH-uhns

We made it to St. Paul! But the sooner I can forget the stress of getting two cats, a laptop, and a baby with stroller through LAX's bottlenecked and asinine security checkpoint, the better. So I'm not going to write about that. The flight itself was fine. Cats and baby flew just fine. The iPod went a long way towards taking the edge off my LAX-induced foul mood. Sure is great to have all your music just a few clicks away!

Unfortunately, there were more hassles at this end transferring from one terminal to another, which you might expect would involve just a little indoor walking and/or a door to door tram of some sort. No. To get from baggage claim to the Alamo desk that had our minivan (as opposed to the Alamo desk in the terminal where we landed) we had to walk down many corridors, take a couple of elevator rides, exit the terminal into a huge empty/partially under construction parking structure following temporary "light rail this way" signs where we walked what felt like a mile (and every 20 feet or so there was a big gap in the concrete that caught the wheels of the rented cart I was pushing and threatened to tumble the cats from the top of our pile of luggage onto the concrete deck) , more elevators in brand new frigidly air conditioned spookily Muzak'd and deserted elevator lobbies, then waiting outside on a nearly deserted light rail platform for at least 10 minutes, taking a short (thankfully free) train ride one stop down the line to the main terminal. Getting on and off the train involved more wheel-grabbing gaps - by this time I was so pissed off at this entire ridiculously convoluted inconvenient transfer that I yelled "GODDAMNSONAOFABITCH!!!!!!!" as I kicked that f-ing cart off the train and probably startled some of those nice min-eh-SOH-uhns riding their pretty light rail train from Mall of America to downtown Minneapolis. Eh, they were probably tourists anyway. More walking and probably more elevators I don't remember, but finally we got to the Alamo desk that had our minivan. It was all one gigantic pain in my ass. Lorie seemed much calmer throughout the whole trip mostly just pushing the stroller and otherwise tending to Audrey while I dealt with the cats and all the luggage and the f-ing LAX security nazis.

I will never fly again. This country has gone overboard on the airplane security. Don't you realize that you're more likely to die in a car accident than at the hands of a terrorist on a plane? Even without this hyper security. But no one gives a second thought to hopping in their car and tooling around every day of their lives. Let's get some perspective people! Bushco is training us all to be mindless sheep as they shred the constitution, invade our privacy, imprison, torture, and murder people around the world, punish those who exercise their freedom of speech, and move this country closer and closer to a police state. [A couple of days ago I opened a Target credit card account. The clerk screwed it up royally, and while chatting with the three managers that were called over to straighten it out, they mentioned homeland security could potentially get involved! Because opening a store credit account got screwed up by a moron clerk??!] But don't get me started. If I can't go somewhere by driving or taking a train, I ain't goin'. Nazi homeland security and all the airports and airlines can go down the toilet for all I care. We need more rail transit in the US anyway. It's much more efficient than flying or driving. It's a moot point anyway since peak oil is going to price flying out of our reach soon enough. And don't argue with me about politics -- get your own blog.

Ahh, that felt good to vent a little. Sorry if I sounded crazy, but that's the state of mind that flying puts me in these days. Now you have a tiny idea of how I felt sitting on the floor Sunday morning waiting for our plane.

Where was I?

St. Paul is nice. It's already rained here in five days as many times as it rained in LA in 16 months! There's a nice chill in the air. Our apartment is in an historic neighborhood so most of the houses are big and gingerbread style with detailed paint jobs. Big trees (real trees, not palm trees) line all the streets and create a lush green canopy high overhead. Many cool things are within a short walk. Too bad it looks like we couldn't afford to rent a house right in this neighborhood (they're all too big!), and we don't want our next dwelling to be an apartment. We're sick of too-close neighbors -- not just the noise they make, but we're very self conscious about the noise we make in an apartment -- and that just sucks feeling like you have to tiptoe around and keep the music and tv turned down in your own home.

Looks like we're going to love living in the Twin Cities!

Lorie's been asleep for hours. Time to join her.