I had an epiphany today, each day I'm going to try to post about something that isn't bigger in Texas. Today, in the EHB grocery store, we bought egg nog. We bought 4 half-gallon containers because they don't have gallon containers like they do back home. So egg nog is not bigger in Texas.
I have to tell you about this place we're staying. I've been here about a half hour and I couldn't go to bed without iterating through them.
First impressions are: not so bad. It wasn't too hard to find (it's quite close to the freeway, actually). Second impression: the night clerk was really helpful and nice.
The room was on the second floor. I attempted to commandeer a luggage cart, but the night clerk told me it wouldn't roll up the stairs—the elevator was out of service. This would have been an easy trip with a working elevator.
When I opened the room, the first thing that caught my attention was the smell of paint. It's quite strong in here. Probably covering up some bloodstains was my first thought about the smell.
The door doesn't close all the way by itself, you have to push on it heavily to get it to latch. I'm going to have to tell my wife that when she gets back from picking up her parents at the airport.
There is no closet, but I found a short bar near the window that someone imagined would be good enough to hang stuff on.
When I turned the shower on, I got cold water (that's a good thing when it's 75°F outside and you're used to 25°F at this point. But, when I turned the sink on I saw very brown water come out of it. Just for a few seconds, though, then it turned clear. I bought two sodas from the vending machine down the hall because I was thirsty. Water would have been fine, but the machine doesn't have any, and I'm not drinking from that sink.
The shower was nice, the towels were small (what hotel doesn't have small towels??). I brought my own shampoo as I've come to realize you can never count on it being there for you. There is, actually, a shampoo container on the sink ("sunflower and grapefruit essences", in case you were wondering), but I have my doubts whether it will be replaced during our 9-night stay.
The Internet connection here is secured, but I didn't check us in and my wife doesn't think to ask about such things, so until I get the WEP key I'm writing this in notepad.
The air conditioner works pretty good, it's been on about 15 minutes and has cooled the room significantly from what it was at when I arrived. I did, however, have to yank the housing off it to get to the controls and switch it on. It looks like it's going to fall off, and yet it remains hanging there, as if to say "I'm going to wait until you fall asleep before clanging loudly to the ground."
There is a seam in the flooring right down the main walkway of the room, between the beds and TV. I know this because I have to walk along it, and it is most woefully un-level. They say everything is bigger in Texas, and I can certainly testify that the difference in heights of their floorboards certainly are bigger than anywhere else I've stayed.
And now for the good news! Fortunately, I'm not really having to pay for any of this. Just the tax on the two rooms: one for Lorien and I, one for her parents. They are members of some kind of business barter system called Itex, and are using some of their "Itex money" so all of us can stay here and not be exposed to 9 children at 7am (or 5am on Christmas!). So for about $160 we've got two rooms for 9 nights. I love my wife's family, but I'm very glad to have a private place to return to every evening now.
The time change (from GMT-8 to GMT-6) isn't too bad, and surprisingly enough I got up real early this morning, so I'm trying to keep myself awake by writing this and so I can let my wife kDnow about the non-latching door issue. Local time right now is 1:45am, but the Coca-cola in me says that's just fine.
Welcome to Texas. It's a foreign country. As evidence, I present to you the space cow I saw in the airport:
I knew I wouldn't need it, so I left my coat at home. We flew in last night at 11:30pm local time, and the temperature was in the 70s. And it's humid. The trip wasn't too bad, despite the 4 hour layover in Salt Lake City. It would have been a longer layover, but we left almost 45 minutes late out of Spokane because the plane was covered in snow.
I've been up since 6am local time, which is 4am back home. I'm beginning to wonder how much sleep I'm going to get on this "vacation"…
We're off to Houston, Texico tomorrow. We will be there for ten days, and not back until the 28th. I don't know how much Internet access I'll have, so I can't promise I'll write much between now and then.
Perhaps you can solve The Mystery of the Decapitated Cover Models.
Tonight, on a quick shopping trip to the local store, I was in the feminine products aisle with my wife buying, well, you know what. And then I saw them—maxi-pads for thongs.
I took my written and driving test today to become a certified forklift driver. I don't expect to have to use it, but I had to man up, because my wife already has a forklift operator's license.
After over 600 days of using my blog's plug-in for books I'm reading, and over 36,000 pages read in that time, I've decided to change over to my LibraryThing widget instead. I lose some functionality (like currently reading, recently read, etc), but I also don't feel compelled to keep my page count over 60 pages per day, which was happening with the previous system (since I wrote a widget that kept count of pages read). Let me know what you think of the changes, if you like them or not.
Well instead of finishing any one of several projects around the house, or just playing video games, I continue to work on my online library. I'm up over 400 books now, and have tons of tags in place, too. I love tags.
I've had the link to LibraryThing on this site for at least a year, and I'm finally getting around to putting all my books in it. I have to say, I really like they way it works. I only have 331 books in it right now, but I'm working on getting the rest imported as I have time.
I will probably end up replacing the book plugin I'm currently using on this blog with a more sophisticated one, but will also probably drop the Pages Read plugin I wrote to take advantage of it.
You can view my library here.
My telescope has a janky focus knob, it's hard to reach when the scope is pointed up. The ScopeTronix Flexi-focus solves this problem. I could really use one.
I just had my second too-late comeback come into my head in the past month or so. Our accountant's assistant just came to my office and said "Just a friendly reminder, I need your signed purchase orders for last month."
I realized that was a perfect time to reply "Come back when the reminder is about to get unfriendly."
The first one was when I bought my replacement battery for my Motorola Razr phone at the AT&T store. They tried to sell me an iPhone. I should have replied "No thanks, I'm happy with my current religion."
I have one more week of work before leaving to Houston for 10 days. I may be blogging intermittently during that time. It depends on how crazy it is down there.
Today is our company Christmas party, we're gonna have some great food, including Alaskan king crab! Woohoo!