Oh, to be an Octopus

Hey house! I'm home! Silence. It's me. You know, the troublesome one. The one with the penchant for pissing people off. The one who can't control her blubbering , blithering emotions. It's nice to go gallivanting about the country, but it's even nicer to come home. In Irish they say "Neel aon thinthawn mar dho hinthawn fain" [Please, no groaning from all you Gaeilge scholars out there--the spelling is phonetic so people can make a decent stab at the correct pronunciation....] It literally means "there's no hearth like your own hearth." Chivers marmalade had a label on their jars, a picture of a blazing old fashioned fire in an old fashioned kitchen, with cooking pots hanging over it and a little black cat curled up nearby. It was done in shades of yellow, gold and black and made me want to crawl right into the picture and curl up with the cat. The phrase and the label, though unrelated, always go together in my mind.

So, one more venture into the wild blue yonder, one more safe landing, thank you God, and one more opportunity to see our tax dollars at work. I have yet to see an octopus in an airport security line, even though an octopus is the one creature perfectly designed for the job: a tentacle to hold the purse; another to hold the I.D. card, which must needs be kept outside of the purse due to the neccessity of showing it over and over to security personnel; a tentacle to hang onto the carry on bag; a tentacle to hold the coat, which must be removed, presumably to reassure said security personnel that one does not have dangerous assult rifles strapped to one's person ; yet another tentacle to hold one's boarding pass out for inspection; a couple of tentacles to assist in the neccessary removal of one's shoes, while making sure that all the other tentacles don't lose the run of themselves and forget what it is they're supposed to be holding onto....

And today, the pinnacle of idiocy. Because I did not have it in a ziploc bag, I had to surrender my tube of lip balm which is a hair less than three inches long, but a threat, apparently, to national security. A kind gentleman behind me in line, who was also rolling his eyes at the nonsense, put it in a plastic bag with his own stuff, carried it through the security equipment and returned it to me on the other side. Did the plastic bag neutralize the threat from the lip balm?? I can be quite dense on matters of national security. Maybe I missed something.

The kicker is, stowed in my carry on bag was a truly lethal pair of knitting needles about which I was hassled not at all. Is it just me or is there really something cuckoo about all this?