Category Archives: Leisure time

As the title should imply I have made it back from vacation. In one piece no less. I had a lot of fun throwing away my money this year, but that is a story for a different time.

When we arrived at the hotel last Sunday I started to type a post into my wife’s laptop. I actually typed out a total of three posts while we were up there, all in the first two days, after which I decided that I should really just disconnect and enjoy the vacation. I will probably get the wife to email me the .txt file that I saved those posts in just to see if there was anything noteworthy written in them, somehow I doubt that that is the case. If there is anything good in them, expect it to follow within the next couple of days.

Vacation was awesome! If you have never been to Laughlin, just imagine Las Vegas on a river; There are numerous boat tours ( a couple of which we went on) and a much less seedy atmosphere than Vegas, and you can walk on the beach! Not the beach of the Hotel we stayed in though. Well, technically you could walk on that beach, if you were brave enough, the wife tried it for a couple of minutes and then gave up. Turns out that the smoking $19 room rate doesn’t give you the best of beaches to walk on. Who knew?

Laughlin is also built as a casino town. What that means to you and me is that when you look over to the next casino, then consider walking there, it is actually something you can do. While in Vegas we made the mistake of trying to walk from one casino to the next, it seemed like it was so close. Fifteen minutes later, with sore legs and a sunburn, we made it to the next casino; Laughlin has the casinos built much closer together. There were only two casinos that we actually got in the car to drive to, and that could attributed more to us being lazy than the length of the walk. The ‘captain’ on the boat tour said that the rest of the water’s edge had all been bought for further casino development, which is likely true, but they offer shuttles from the current ends of the strip for four bucks (boat shuttles by the way, try getting that in Vegas).

Beyond that, Laughlin is very similar to Vegas. They try to pump as much alcohol as possible into you to keep you throwing money into the machines; They have cheap, cheap, really cheap food; The majority of the casinos are owned by the same corporations that own the casinos in Vegas; The casino with the best (or cheapest) buffet is usually the busiest one. Also, there are a lot more old people in Laughlin than in Vegas, I don’t know if that is by design, but there were certainly a lot of people I met there that should have been coffin fillers years and years ago…

The one major advantage that Laughlin has (currently) is the lack of porn and prostitution advertising. The porn and prostitution smut that you see everywhere in Vegas is just not there. That was a really nice bonus. I don’t suppose that means that there is any less prostitution, but it does mean that you don’t really have to see it so much. That is good all around.

Just in case I haven’t yet mentioned the river, I am going to talk about that for a bit.

They have little boats that go casino to casino along the river; they have boats that do tours of the river; they have day tours that go all the way down to the London Bridge. The prices on them go from slightly outrageous all the way to flat-out, you’ve got to be fucking kidding me. I doubt that the flat-out you’ve got to be fucking kidding me is worth the money, but I am pretty cynical, as such I never paid to go on it. I did get the chance to go on a couple of the boats though, just not that one.

The rides on the boats were pretty cool, well worth the price of admission, if you ever find yourself in Laughlin you should certainly do it; Not only is it a pretty sweet ride, but it will also keep you out of the casino for a couple of hours, and that is worth its weight in gold.

This vacation, as opposed to all other vacations that I can think of, I didn’t put a single thing on a credit card. Well, I suppose that I did book the room on a credit card, but after that it was cash for everything. I lost far more money than I care to admit, but it was actual cash, no debt resulted from the vacation to Laughlin. It was good times.

More to follow?

I think that the Gogos may have said it best: “vacation is all I ever wanted, vacation is how to get away…” while the aforementioned band did go on to say other things, I like the sentiment of that particular verse. It is, unfortunately, pretty hard to pull off.

As I sit here now it is 12:34 AM according to the clock at the bottom right of my screen, and we only just started, and finished, packing for vacation. My “official” last minute at work was at 8 PM tonight, but I can never assume that I won’t be callled back for various reasons long after that. It took me about four hours of waiting for the call from work (which thankfully never came) to actually start packing my bags. I think that I might actually be on vacation tomorrow…I may be somewhere that is away from here, sweet!

I will be on vacation in Laughlin this year; Laughlin is basically Las Vegas without the advertising, not to mention a bit closer to home. I hope they have the same buffet prices as Vegas though, else the 19 dollar room rate might not seem quite as good.

I am so amped up about vacation that I doubt I will get a wink of sleep tonight. I just want to get in the car and go. I am desperate to spend some time away from work, anywhere. I still fear that I might get that call about something else that is broken and I will have to go back to work. I wish that my wife was not so tired from spending her whole Friday and Saturday cleaning up the house, then we could go right now!

We only started to select clothes for the vacation at about 11:30, and we are now done. A few vacations under your belt can certainly help you to find the correct clothes, but, a good rule of thumb is that you aren’t going to wear pants if you don’t have to. If you have no pants in the suitcase, you aren’t going to wear any. Pretty sound logic, and also pretty good advice. You know that you aren’t going to wear the pants, why throw them into the suitcase?

This year my wife made it a point to make sure that I had a pair of shorts for swimming purposes, I guess she heard my cries the last few years about not having a swimsuit when she wanted to go swimming. Now I might actually have to be at, near, around or otherwise in the presence of a swimming pool…Then I might have to actually get in!

For all of the wonderful things my wife does for me it is hard to fault her for anything. Yet, when she wants me to be in swim trunks, thus showing off the fact that I am trying to hide the planet “Nepture” within my stomach… That is pretty harsh… I never ask her to put on a bikini and parade around a bunch of 20 something observers, I doubt she would get a negative comment though; Along with her slightly larger stature, she got an attitude to match. You really don’t want to piss her off…Trust me…

Anyway, the vacation… It really started about five hours ago for me, it doesn’t seem like much of a vacation yet. Once Ray gets here, in the morning, I guess I will finally concede that it is time to leave work behind for a few days.

Thing is that you never can…At least I can’t…

As I alluded to recently, I will be out of town for vacation starting Sunday. I had previously thought that having the blogger script would allow me to actually make more frequent posts while away, but it is starting to look a lot less likely than I had hoped. The hotel that I am going to be staying in has a fee of $1 for any toll free number dialed, and since I am now on dsl at home I don’t think I can use the msn dial-up numbers any more. Let me call and check. I’ll be right back…

Okay, back. Well it turns out that the people at qwest aren’t really sure whether or not I will be able to access the msn network through dial-up. Two people said I should be able to, one person said that I wouldn’t be able to. Now to answer the question of why I spoke to three people in the first place. I thought that they were overcharging me for the dsl service, which they told me would be 39.99, but which I am getting charged 44.99 for. There is a credit on the bill to knock it back down to the 39.99, but they charge for taxes and the such from the 44.99 price, therefore I pay almost fifty bucks for it after all discounts and taxes. I was fine with that, now I know, and “knowing is half the battle”.

The lady on the phone, however, suggested that I sign up for an uber offer which is supposed to be only for new customers; 19.99 a month 1.5 dsl for an entire year! I jumped on that shit. Thus I was transferred to another person to ask the question about dial-up when you have a dsl account. Of course at this point I really don’t care. If I do have to pay a buck every time I access the internet while I am on vacation, it is certainly not going to cost me the $240 dollars that I am saving by initially calling up to ask the question. One of the few times I have actually ended up happy after talking to a customer service rep.

Anyway, the posts may not be very frequent, if at all, while I am on vacation. I don’t trust the hotel policy, I don’t trust my wife’s laptop very much and, given what happened last year while I was on vacation, I don’t really trust the tiny little wires that run through the hotel either. I will just have to test the waters once we get there.

BTW this post has that name in particular to be a juxtaposition to the post about the apocalypse. All things are relative after all.

I am frequently asked why I visit Las Vegas every year for vacation. The answer is always Cheap rooms. Where else in the world can you go and get an average of $33 bucks a night for a five night stay? The rooms are cheap, and there is entertainment galore.

Of course one can only walk down the strip so many times before getting horribly bored, not to mention that the security check stations to cross the Hoover Dam take nearly as long as the drive itself, so we are going to a different destination this year. Laughlin. Laughlin is sort of like Vegas light. You get the casinos, you get the gambling, you get the cheap rooms, but you don’t have to drive across the Hoover dam. I hope they have the buffets. The buffets alone are worth the price of admission. Where else in the world can you eat fifty shrimp as part of a 6 dollar buffet? Time will tell though.

Marvel at my cheapness. I could have had the same room for only 27 dollars per night had I booked it a day before, but still, 33 per night is good considering that the Sunday night is 85 dollars and the rest are $19. You only wish you had the ‘cheap ass’ chops to pull that off, and get your wife to agree to it. The fact that the hotel has a Krispy Kreme, a Dreyer’s Ice Cream shop, a Subway and a pizza joint might have helped her to agree though.

Laughlin is certainly the way to go, as far as the cheapest vacation ever, but there are other places to go that can compensate for the price of the hotel room. For instance, Millie told me, after a stay in Taiwan, that it only cost her a few dollars per month to live in a rat infested apartment there, I assume that most of the apartments there are rat infested though, so I think that was a tremendous value. Millie went on to lose a lot of weight while in Taiwan, but that could have been due to increased exercise, right? When Millie made it back to Florence (AZ), my wife really wanted to give her a cookie, Millie looked so pale that we feared she might be the dead walking among us. Turns out that she loved the anorexic look that she got while she had the tapeworm so much that she started to exercise regularly, my fears were misplaced.

You know, there is a reason why Buddha only got fat once he found enlightenment. That reason is simple: Poor people can’t afford the flashy rooms in Las Vegas, the 19 dollar per night accommodations in Laughlin are much more in line. I bet Buddha hit Laughlin a few times along the way to becoming the ultimate peasant, he has the gut to show it. Thankfully we don’t have mythological entities doing the commercials for travel, we get William Shatner…..How is that thankful?

We got back home from vacation a couple of days ago. This ranks as possibly the worst vacation of all time, not just counting my own personal experiences, I mean the worst vacation anyone has ever had. It was not all that enjoyable at all and I am not going to get into it. Best just to try and forget.

I did manage to write quite a bit of stuff while I was on vacation but I did not have a connection that allowed me to really try to upload anything. It is a miracle that I was able to get the two pictures in the last post uploaded. It took about thirty minutes for them to upload, thankfully I was occupied with other things or I would never have had the patience. As far as the stuff that I wrote while I was away I am not sure how I am going to handle it. I could just slap it all on the page here, but it is even less organized than usual so I really think I better edit it a bit. That is not going to happen today, or tomorrow, so don’t hold your breath.

I guess my few site readers grew bored of not having anything to read and they all started to go away. Judging by my site statistics I have had only one visit each of the last three days, one of those days I know that it was me that visited; I wanted to see how the pictures looked on a real monitor instead of the one on the laptop. I hope that as I began to post on a regular basis my meager fan base will find its way back to me. Time will tell.

• Well here are a few photos that I took while we were in Las Vegas. I had wanted to see some of these old Las Vegas landmarks for years. We have been going to Vegas on vacation every year for the last four years and only just found them this year. I guess that just tells you how stubborn I am about asking for directions, eh? Especially when you take into consideration that the hotel we stayed in last year and this year is owned by the same company that owns a number of the casions on the old strip, where the photos you see here were taken.

The first photo I really just wanted to take the picture of the horse, but I decided to go ahead and get the shot of the 7/11 sign at the same time. To anyone who has never visited Las Vegas I think it would be a bit surprising that damn near every shop on the strip has a sign that is lit up with hundreds of lights and neon. The 7/11 one is a pretty good example, but some of the more humorous ones were at places like McDonald’s and Walgreens. Just imagine them with signs lit up every bit as much as the 7/11 one, it is something to see.

The picture on the left is, of course, Vegas Vic. This is surely one of the most recognizable landmarks in Las Vegas, of course it took us four years to find him, but find him we did. Here is the photographic proof. Vic’s arm doesn’t wave anymore and some of the neon lights don’t appear to be working, other than that he is just like I imagined him.

There is a canopy over the top of Vic’s head that now runs along three solid blocks of Freemont Street. I think that it was constructed in 1999 or 2000, can’t remember for sure. This was the other reason that we wanted to find the old part of Las Vegas; To see the light show at the Freemont Street Experience. If you are ever in Las Vegas you should definitely take the time to make it down there after dark to watch the show. It lasts about ten minutes and is pretty cool. Due to the length of the canopy where it all happens it makes the show look 3d if you look down the street. I tried to take a photo of it but it certainly didn’t look like it should, I really think it is something that you just have to see in person to enjoy.

The final photo is just a closer photo of the girl that is across the street from Vic. I am not sure if she has a name, if she does I don’t know what it is. This photo was hard to take because of all the pillars around the sign and the fact that there was a huge chicken dressed as Elvis blocking it from the other side. A lot of the lights are out on this one but I still wanted to get a picture since I may never again get the opportunity. I should also note that just below this sign there is a large video screen that shows women stripping. Even though it puts little stars over their nipples, I think that it is a bit wrong. This particular part of Vegas had more kids there than anywhere else that I can think of. The only possible exception would be Circus Circus. Still, should they really be able to show stripping women on the outside of a building where anyone can see it? It is Las Vegas…

I guess that is just about all for today. Hopefully I will get back into a regular routine with these updates now that I am back. With a bit of luck I might even sift through all the crap I wrote while I was in the hotel room and get some of that posted in the next few days. As always, don’t hold your breath.

Vacation has officially begun. I got a call shortly after 6:30am from the boss at work which forced me out of a sleep that I had barely gotten into, having gone to bed past 2am and not sleeping well due to overwhelming heat and humidity. Thus we were on the road bound for Las Vegas by 9am.

The drive went relatively quickly, at least at first. We had made it from Florence to Sun City in only about an hour, better time than we have ever had previously I think. We even had to make a stop at the Wal -Mart over there to buy myself some jean shorts and some extra batteries for the digital camera. Trust me, you do not want to have to buy batteries at the littly sundry shop in a hotel on the Vegas Strip, nor do you want to buy them at a convenience store where either way you are paying at least four times what they are worth. I am just glad that I remembered them while we were in the store, as my camera only uses two batteries and when I say uses, I mean uses.

As for the road-trip itself, it was pretty uneventful. That means that we only nearly died twice, a new low for the drive. Once was due to someone in an SUV trying to pass three cars when he didn’t have nearly enough time to do it, which forced us, the car in front of us, and three oncoming cars to all move over onto the shoulder. That kind of driver is the reason there are so many fatalities along this stretch of road. The really irritating thing about it was the he did that when we were less than five miles from getting onto the Interstate, why would someone be in such a hurry that saving ten seconds would be worth their life and the lives of people in at least five other cars? Retorical, I guess. The other near death experience was while we were on the interstate and apparently a tow truck to vehicles ahead of us lost the tread off of one of his tires. My wife swerved to avoid it, but hit it anyway, and the truck and trailer behind us did the same thing, nearly jack-knifing which would have been really bad for him and us, as he was following us pretty closely. If he actually had lost control there would have been nowhere for us to go, and since we were going downhill he would not likely have been slowing at all whenthe weight and inertia of his trailer started pushing the truck along. Gosh this is a fun drive.

The Hoover dam is usually the worst part(as far as time) of the trip. It went pretty well today with the 8 miles (four on each side of it) taking only about 25 minutes. I even snapped a few photos in the hopes of illustrating the point that I made some time back about the drought having made the water level in Lake Mead drop several feet. I am only able to view the photos on my laptop currently, but as I was in a car that was in motion when I snapped them, I think they came out pretty damn good. We may actually stop there on the return trip since it won’t be a Sunday so there won’t be nearly as many people there, that could allow me to get some even better photos of it.

I mentioned several days ago that I would not be able to update the page because of charges at the hotel, as it turns out I could be wrong. They are now charging us for “unlimited local calls”, and as I use MSN for internet access that means that I have both a pc (laptop) and a local number to dial. I am a bit nervous about it, as I won’t know if they are charging me until I try to check out and then have to wonder why I spent so much on internet access when I could have treated myself to multiple prostitutes for the same price, or less depending on the quality of the prostitute.

Update: after having spent a few hours out whiling away the time on some penny slots, then eating breakfast at 9pm (honestly, where else in the world can you get an omelette and hash browns at that hour), then spending an additional hour or so playing some video poker, I started trying the internet access thing to see if it worked. I spent a bit of time on the phone with customer support for my ISP to make sure that I would be able to do it without having to dial a toll free number (which cost a buck a pop through the hotel), and then got online just long enought to check my email. I am going to inquire at the desk tomorrow about phone charges and if there are truly no charges for the local calls, this post will likely go online at that point.

Another thing, or two, or three, about the vacation and the photos and the website and all of that stuff is that I completely forgot that I have absolutely no imaging software on the laptop. What that means, basically, is that all of the photos that I take while I am here are going to have to be sorted by whether I think they are usable, then transferred to one of the other pcs once I get home for some editing, thumb-nailing and the such. If it turns out that the internet really is free for me to use while here, I might upload some of the full size photos and link to them through my updates so that I can then download and thumbnail them when I get home since there is no way that could take more time than trying to transfer them from pc to pc when I have to do it a couple of images at a time on 3.5″ floppies.

A few other things that you should keep in mind while you are reading this. First, the laptop is the only computer that I have used in the last three years or so that does not have a v-shaped keyboard, so typos are to be expected (even more so than normal). Second, it is 11:30pm right now and I have been up since 6:30am after going to bed after 2am, so I am not operating on a lot of sleep to begin with. Third, one day we will all look back on this and laugh (I am only saying that in case I do something horribly stupid and end up in prison or something).

There is yet another issue that I had not even thought of prior to the vacation. The character map on the laptop is way different than the character map on the other pc (likely due to fewer keys and a different OS). That has made it so that I am not able to use the little dot that I always have used previously to attempt to separate my thoughts. The alt commands just did nothing, so even if I typed it in and didn’t see the dot it was not like it was really there but I couldn’t see it, no, it was just not there. Whether I will correct this after I get back home is up in the air only if you think that I take a lot of pride in this page, which I don’t, ’cause if I did I would not have totally ripped off someone else’s layout to begin with. Though I must admit that it has been quite theraputic in a way, calming without having to resort to anger against those around me. It sure is fun to bitch.

A final note before I go read a bit more of Harry Potter (3rd book). I just looked over at the clock and realized that I am going to be 30 in less than a half an hour. No matter how hard I concentrate on that damn clock it just won’t stop. I think I would like to be upset or depressed about this so-called “milestone” birthday, but the truth is that every breath that you take moves you one closer to death. When you start counting things such as years you have been alive, breaths that you have taken, times your heart has beaten, that is the point where you are not really counting down to your death anymore, more like you are hoping for your death: No two people ever live the same number of seconds, no two ever take the same number of breaths, no two hearts beat the same number of times in a lifetime…Some people die of “old age” when they are over 100 while some die from the same affliction in their 50’s. Whether you like it or not, the 50’s are gonna be upon you about 2 decades before you want them.

I have finally gotten my ftp client tow ork correctly and so I am going to throw a couple of phots below. These are both taken for the illustrative purpose of showing the level of lake mead. The white that you see on the canyon walls in both photos is where the water level was a couple of years ago, while the water itself shows where it is now. I saved them at 75% size which is about the only option I have right now, so if they are huge on your screen I do apologize.