I am not even going to mention yesterday’s missed post. If you care enough to be unhappy about that, go ahead and Shoot me an email.
One other thing to mention before I get into bitching today is that it is Flux’s birthday. Flux being the guy that runs that website over at BlackChampagne.com and who also handles a lot of the stuff over at DiabloII.net, and whose site layout I completely ripped off when setting up this site. I knew that his birthday was close on the calendar to mine, but I did not know the date. Now I do, and as it happens I sent him a Terry Pratchett book a couple of weeks ago (totally unrelated to his birthday) which I will call a gift to him for both his birthday and the multiple times he has helped me with issues regarding my own site. It is certainly not something that could/would compensate for the time that he spent helping me, yet, I think that he did appreciate getting the book as a gift, and was not looking for anything in return when he was helping me with issues regarding this site. Of course when I totally ripped off the layout of his site he would have either been pissed off or flattered, I am hoping it is the latter.
• Today was father’s Day also. As I have previously written, my Father died on Christmas Eve in 1990 and I therefore don’t have any real reason to celebrate this day. What I do have is my wife’s step-father, who brought my wife up for the most part, and without whom she would likely be instilled with a lot of different morals and the such. Being father’s Day, we went along with him, my mother-in-law, my brother-in-law, the wife and myself to beautiful Sedona, or that was the plan at least. I guess no one actually thought it through enough to realize that the beautiful Sedona is actually a three hour drive -each way- from our current location. Not the best destination for a day trip.
The Father-in-law was the first to pipe up about maybe just going out to lunch instead, which seemed like a pretty reasonable idea, compared to sitting in the car for six hours, and after all it was his day. Everyone seemed satisfied at this point, except the mother-in-law who went on to bitch about how they had been to Phoenix every day since thursday, and she just wanted to get out of town. That particular story took a right turn, missed some exits, and ended up not being the story that she had originally told, even though there were four witnesses. (more on that later)
So Lee, the father-in-law, wanted to eat at a place called the Texas RoadHouse. My brother-in-law went in to check how long it would be to get into the place. 30 minutes, he said. But that thirty minutes was to get the timer box thing that lets you walk around while you wait, the actual wait time to get any actual food was more like three or four hours. That is a long time to wait for a slab of dead bovine.
What happened next was a nice little ride to the next Black Angus. There was absolutely no wait, as a matter of fact we were wondering if the place was in business when we rolled in. The place was just dead. I came in a bit after everyone else, as there is no smoking in the area where the restaurant is located, and the car I was riding in smelled like dog shit and copenhagen, but somehow the smell of a bit of tobacco smoke would sour the smell of it (that, the tobacco smoke souring the smell of her car, was what the mother-in-law actually said to me, whether she realized that the car currently smells like a cross between dog shit and copenhagen I do not know.)
The server there immediately spilled water all over the table, and as flat surfaces do the water ran to the lowest spot, the lowest spot on this day was my crotch. I had two full glasses of ice-water dumped on my crotch, I would have liked to have gotten angry, but anger never gets you anywhere. Instead, I smiled at the waitress and excused myself to the men’s room. I was actually wearing some rayon-blend shorts so the water didn’t actually soak in, but I was also wearing cotten-blend briefs that felt very cold at just that moment.
We went on to order our food and I just wanted a sandwich. I had a huge sirloin steak just the other day. I actually hoped that Lee (the father-in-law) would have ordered a really big hunk of beef (like a 16oz. T-bone, so I could have paid for it as a gift), what actually happened was that we split the check, I offered at least ten dollars more than what the meals my wife and myself had cost. I would have happily paid for their meal as well had they asked, but what happened is that the mother-in-law took a calculator out of her purse and started running numbers. I put $100 in my wallet before we left the house this morning, thinking that I would pick up the cost of the entire meal (as a gift to my father-in-law), when she took out that calculator to try to figure who owed how much I was so out.
Tommorrow I will likely go into a discussion about “conditioned air”. The thing about air is that you can ‘condition’ it in any way you would like. The fact that we americans are used to the air being conditioned to be, well, colder than the outside air, and hopefully not nearly as humid leads me to wonder if maybe the A/C in that car is just not working. If it is 115 outside, and you are just praying for the car to stop so that you can get outside, wouldn’t that make you think that possibly your A/C is not working quite right?
Yes, it was 115 degrees today outside the car, inside the car it was likely 125 degrees and very humid. I had sweat pouring off of my forehead from the second that I sat in the car. Defend that car to the death and it will still not hold a candle to the A/C that you get out of the cheapest, piece-of-shit car that you can get in Arizona. No A/C=No Fucking Way….
Would you rather ride in a car with a nice nameplate or a car that actually works?