Margaret and I just went through security at the Portland airport and boy are they getting strict! They have the sensitivity on the scanners turned up so high they would go off if you had more than three fillings in your teeth! I dutifully put my bag on the belt; they then said I had to take off my coat, so I did that. Then I tried to go through the scanner, but the guard had me take off my shoes. I tried again, but of course it went off, and I realized that I had my watch on, then I tried AGAIN! and had to go back and take my belt off! By the time I was cleared, I was glad that I was wearing my firetruck underwear, because that's all it felt like I had on and if everyone has to see me in my underwear, I would want to be wearing those!

I remember once right after 9/11 that Margaret and I were flying back from New Orleans. They were doing random extensive searches of people and they picked an old lady that needed a walker and an Amish women (okay, she probably wasn't AMISH, but she was dressed like one, she had some knitting she was doing, and she didn't even have a iPOD!--and in my book THAT'S Amish!) I had no idea that Al Quaida was so desperate that they were recruiting amongst the elderly and the technophobes. Maybe they offer a better health care package than Medicare provides. Another time, flying back from Europe, we went through Dutch security, but that wasn't invasive enough for the US State Department, so we had to go through American security, too, before we could even get to the gate. They conducted personal interviews with every person getting on the plane--asking us about the nature of our trip, how we got to the airport that morning, if I wore boxers or briefs, what that condom full of heroin was doing up my... well, you get the picture. What REALLY set off their suspicion flags, though, was the fact that we only had ONE piece of luggage between the two of us. Who every heard of such a thing--especially with Americans?!? What we thought was a convenience (who wants to lug around a crap load of bags on a trip through Europe?--plus compared to the French tourists we ran into, there wasn't THAT much need to change our clothes very often) turned out to make us terror suspects--I swear, I hadn't been confronted with that much suspicion since I was being questioned by the mission president in Norway after an entire ward turned into atheists (and I still maintain that I had almost NOTHING to do with it!).