Category: Diary (Page 22 of 38)

My sneaky wife went online and ordered me a surprise treat that arrived today: 12 bags of Jaffas! For those of you not from the Southern Hemisphere, Jaffas are a small spherical orange candy shell surrounding a chocolate center. We’ve been looking for them and not finding them anywhere. Apparently they don’t exist here…

Well, Lisa found a website called www.everythingaustralian.com which turns out to be run by a family living in Little Rock, Arkansas! Of all places… Anyway, they seem to have a line of supply of these essential sweets, and Lisa took advantage of it. Hooray!

So, I’ll try really hard not to eat them all and next time we have curious visitors they can sample them.

We arranged to meet Don, Stan, and Jeanne at the Tenaya Creek Brewery & Restaurant for a farewell dinner for Don. It’s weird, he was only here for a couple of days.

After a trip to Hoover Dam with the other members of his tour party, Don spent the afternoon with Stan checking out poems, and computers.

Another great meal accompanied by some good locally-brewed ale. I think my initial impressions of the place have been reinforced.

We said farewell to Don, and left him with Stan while we drove Jeanne home – her knee was bothering her and anyway, it was probably good to let Stan and Don have a last night out with the boys. Ostensibly they checked out the Fremont Experience, which is a kind of audio-visual thingy in the downtown area, but might also have been a nightclub. We’re not sure.

Many of you will know of Stan’s friend Don H, who lives in England and with whom Stan has been corresponding via email for some time now. The way I heard it, they were both radio operators from way back and had met in an Internet chat room. (I’m sure I can’t imagine of a friendship developing this way!) They have never actually met in person, being located some distance apart geographically.

Those of you who don’t know of Don, but who frequent our online photo album may remember that Don draws cartoons to complement Stan’s poetry, and in fact, with our help, managed to completely surprise Stan with a custom cartoon cake for his birthday last year.

Little did Stan know at the time, but it was more or less during the planning of this birthday event that Don let Lisa, Jeanne, and myself know that he was planning to be part of a holiday/lawn bowling tournament tour to the States some six months later, and that it would be passing through Vegas, and wouldn’t it be funny if he could surprise Stan by showing up on his doorstep?

Obviously I couldn’t write about this here, because Stan reads my newsletters too.

Over the last few days, as Don left for the States and traveled with his team on the bowling tour, we kept in touch with him, and the arrangement changed to that of a “chance meeting at one the casinos”. The plan was this: Jeanne would keep Stan busy at the Venetian with an arrangement to meet Lisa and myself at 6:30pm in front of the restaurant at which we were going to eat prior to going to see an exhibition at the Guggenheim (Yeah, the Venetian has a museum in it – see http://www.venetian.com/guggenheim/lasvegas.cfm ). Lisa had told them she had tickets for us all to go to the Goog, but this was only a pretext and was not exactly true.

Meanwhile, Lisa and I planned to be at the Golden Nugget where Don’s tour was staying, and assuming he’d settled in and freshened up, we’d take him with us to met Stan and Jeanne.

The bus was due to get in at 4:00pm, so we figured we had plenty of time to coordinate, but unfortunately Don had rung earlier in the afternoon to say that the bus would be delayed because they’d discovered that under the new security measures, buses with luggage were not allowed to drive over the Hoover Dam. This meant a 2-hour delay on their part. Nonetheless, we stuck to the plan, so this evening found Lisa and myself hovering in the lobby of the Golden Nugget, anxiously awaiting the arrival of the bus. As 6:00 approached, we were debating whether I should go ahead with some excuse – “She met an old friend…er…” – when apparently the bus arrived because Don came walking energetically through the lobby.

L recognised him almost immediately, but I didn’t, although in hindsight the baseball cap with the Union Jack on it should have been a dead giveaway. He had bushy eyebrows and thick glasses that made his dark eyes seem a little larger and more mischievous than you might expect.

After he’d collected his room key, he insisted we leave straight away so that we could get to the restaurant in time. We walked back, collected the car, and drove up the ‘Strip to the Venetian, found out how to park, and walked through the maze of corridors, following Lisa’s casino map printout so that we didn’t get lost.

Jeanne told us later that she had ad a terrible time with Stan because he got tired of playing cards (must be a world first) and wanted to make sure to meet us if we were early (which of course was NOT going to happen now). After all, an early dinner would make sense, we’d have more time at the museum, everybody wins, right?

As we came down the escalator we saw then anxiously hopping from one leg to the other, so I bounded up to let them know we were here, with Don and Lisa a little way behind.

“Here they are!” shrieked Jeanne.

“Why is he smiling?” asked Stan, pointing at me.

Lisa kind of hung back, while Don walked up to Stan with his hand out, grinning.

Stan’s face was priceless.

“…. Don?” he managed, walking forward to greet his old friend.

Recovery was quick, and we retired to the restaurant and proceeded to get acquainted, or re-acquainted, and rather well-lubricated. Lisa put it best: “Far from our worries that Dad might not be able to “switch gears” and even farther from Jeanne’s concern that they might be awkward with each other in person… they were off and running, in pretty much the same joking style as they have in e-mail, almost immediately… They were really cute.”

It was a splendid meal, and great company, and we promised never to pull a stunt like that again.

After walking around the shops in the Venetian, we left Don with Stan and Jeanne and drove home.

Well, burns out. It was a $15 appliance, and doesn’t have any fancy thermal cutouts or anything. Last night I put the rice cradle in crooked, it must have developed a hot spot and died.

We went out and bought a new one today, a little larger and presumably with some failsafe facility.

[Aside: Interesting date today: 22-02-2002]

We watched more Olympic figure skating on TV this evening. It was the Womens’ long program final. 17-year old Sarah Hughes skated beautifully, and took the gold medal place in an unexpected upset. Her genuine surprise and low pressure performance was such a relief to all the stupid judging problems and political shenanigans that have plagued the figure skating events so far that I fell it couldn’t have worked out better.

Lisa and I were debugging someone else’s code this morning when the phone rang. Fully expecting a call from an Acme employee, we slapped the speaker-phone on and answered professionally:

“Yeah?”

Imagine our surprise when a familiar Australian accent boomed forth, cutting through the frustrated atmosphere in the office like a bread knife through a bagel. It was our old friend Michael R. He and Roslyn were in Vegas for a day on their way back from visiting their kids in England. How many years was it since we last saw them?  We arranged to meet them in the lobby of the Luxor where they were staying, and went back to work.

(Background time: For a number of years, Michael organised multi-day seminars and courses for software developers covering various topics – including FoxPro – that brought respected experts out to Australia and New Zealand. Basically, Lisa and I would not have met in person if it were not for Michael. So, in our eyes, he and Roslyn are equivalent to royalty.)

*

The unprofitable and recently sold Aladdin is going through some difficult times. However, there are still good restaurants there, however. Including one that has topped a lot of the local ratings recently: The Commander’s Palace (http://www.commanderspalace.com/cplv/index.html). In the past we’ve often gone and looked at the menus there as we wander through the Dessert Passage, and never really felt that we deserved such a treat. This evening, however, we could think of no visitors more deserving to share the experience with.

Luckily Michael and Roslyn were agreeable, and so before we set out Lisa rang from the Lobby and made reservations for 8:30pm.

It was an interesting evening, involving driving around a lot and getting lost. Michael was missing a suitcase thanks to the airlines, and needed a recharger for his cell phone. We ended up taking a tour of the local mall in search of a cellular outlet/Sprint store or similar, and eventually found exactly the right kind of phone charger at Radio Shack. The helpful clerk even allowed Michael to leave his phone charging behind the counter while we wandered around the mall.

After some shopping and going back to collect the recharged cellphone, Lisa and I charged ourselves with entertaining Michael and Roslyn. (Excuse the pun.)  We parked at the Aladdin and walked around the Desert Passage shops, noting with regret that many of the more established shops were closing; the number of gaps where there used to be shops were growing.

The Commander’s Palace turned out to be deserving of the awards and high ratings, at least in our eyes. The food – kind of New Orleans/American in style – was great, and the service impecable. It was splendid to be able to share the experience with Michael and Roslyn.

(Michael has since informed us that the missing suitcase followed them home to Australia a day or so later!)

After L’s chiro appointment this afternoon we decided to have an early dinner at a sushi/japanese restaurant that was a few doors down from the chiropractor’s office. When we got there, we found that they opened at 5:00, and it was only a quarter of four.

No problem – we’d do some shopping for groceries at the nearby Raley’s. Shopping was uneventful, and the sun had gone behind the hills and thus the temperature was dropping to the chilly side of pleasant, so we felt ok about leaving the groceries in the trunk while we had dinner. We were still a few minutes early, so we jaywalked across Craig St and checked out Blockbuster Video to see if they had any cheap DVDs that we wanted for sale.

They didn’t, but they did have “Series 7” available to rent. I was looking forward to seeing this in the theatres, but perhaps inevitably it appeared to have gone “straight to video”. See http://www.series7movie.com/ for more info, but basically, its premise is that you are watching a TV “marathon” of several consequitive episodes of a fictional reality TV program. Set in the near future, people are randomly selected to hunt each other down until only one is left alive.

If it had been made 5 years ago it would have been funny and amusing satire on the subject of reality TV shows such as “COPS” and MTV’s “The Real World”. It is scary that instead, it is almost indistinguishable from them. The few episodes that I have seen of “Survivor” and “The Mole” – all developed more recently since when “Series 7” was conceived – differ only in that, in this reality, the people on these shows don’t actually have to kill each other.

But back to dinner… we pigged out on sushi in a contented way, and rolled ourselves home, grateful that we had already done the shopping.

Today the men from Tints USA came and installed the window film. They did this by applying the film to the inside of the windows. We selected a strong 80% rejection strength on the East and West facing windows, and a lighter film to the South and North facing windows. It took them about 3 hours – and then they had to come back after they left because they left a whole bunch of stuff behind on our kitchen table.

Now the natural light in the house is noticeably reduced, and has a bronze tint. We can pull the slat blinds all the way instead of leaving them angled, and I think we’ll be a lot more comfortable in Summer.

Stan and Jeanne wanted to take us out to dinner tonight. We arranged to meet at the Regent Resort in Summerlin (Now called the JW Marriott, it got bought I think) for the buffet.

We figured we’d catch a movie at the nearby Suncoast prior to dinner, so after checking out the movie schedules in the paper, we find that _Gosford Park_ is showing at 4:00pm. Excellent!

Seeing it was such a nice day we went for a walk around the neighbourhood to see the progress being made by the builders on the nearby “Bradley Ranch II” housing development. The first bunch of houses were up, and interestingly some of them were at the point where the wiring had been put in but the drywall hadn’t gone up. So we could see where they were running the CAT5e by default. Yes indeedy, this particular housing development has data wiring as an option. Same builder, different development, 12 months later. They are offering the thing they wouldn’t do for us when we were trying to get some non-standard wiring options.

In the same model house as ours, it appears that they are putting one cat5e drop into 3 of the 4 bedrooms (why?) and interestingly, another one in the media bay in the living room. Hmm. I guess they’re not stupid after all. Digital Convergence Ready.

Oh well. Ours is way better, especially now with the added network ports.

We drove to the movie by way of Meadows Mall to look for slippers for me, a baking dish (as specified by Alton Brown of “Good Eats” infamy: www.altonbrown.com) and possibly a sweater for Lisa. And coffee. Here’s the score:

• Macys did not have a backing pan of the requisite specifications (heavy, non-stick, shiny, upright handles, big enough for two burners, turned out edges for crimping foil) so that acquisition was left for another time.
• No store in the mall had sheepskin slippers, therefore these would be acquired via the web (www.llbean.com).
• The Coffee Beanery in the mall *did* have coffee.
• On the out through Macys for a second time, and Lisa found a sweater while Colin bopped to the unlikely jazz-fusion playing on the muzak speakers.

Back to the car and off to see Gosford Park at the Suncoast.

It was about 2 hr 15 min in length, so we have to scramble a little to get back to the car and drive down the road to the nearby Regent/Marriott, where we said we would meet Stan and Jeanne at 6:30.

Walking in from the parking garage, we spied Stan. “Guess what?” he asked rhetorically. “The buffet is closed for remodeling!”

So instead we checked out an Irish Pub that was located elsewhere in the casino complex. It has pretty good food, interesting beer, and a butter toffee pudding to die for.

I’m getting a real buzz out of sitting here in the living room, with my laptop, writing this entry and listening to Dream Theater’s new album on the big living room surround sound speakers. And I’m connected to the Internet through the new network port. Heh…

Several interesting things happened today:

Firstly, the man from USA Tints showed up to give us a quote on adding a UV/Heat repelling film to the windows in the house. Our friendly neighbours across the street had had this done, and apparently it really improved heat retention during the Winter, and kept glare and heat down in the Summer. Seeing as we’d had real trouble in our offices (East-facing windows) last year in the Summer, we thought we’d get a quote – cost and feasibility.

Sonny showed up at 8:30 (I wondered why had “Sorry” written in italic script on the breast of his shirt, but apparently I was mis-reading) and turned out to be a nice chap, ignoring both the Kami the Cat (who had to help) and the making of breakfast (which could not be interrupted).

It seems that the window treatment thing will be quite feasible, so we made an appointment for next Wednesday for “the guys” to do the installation. Sonny said it would take 3 hours.

The second thing that happened was my secret order of geekwear from ThinkGeek was delivered. I had been dropping hints of “a present” for Lisa and she was very curious so it was with some enjoyment I presented her with a black T-shirt decorated with

SELECT * FROM users WHERE clue > 0
0 records selected

OK, so it’s a geek joke. The other item in the order was a sweatshirt for me decorated with the chemical molecular structure of caffeine. What can I say? I’m a geek.