You better believe that I'm leavin' this town
So, I'm down roughly three thousand dollars from the flood damage, which has not put me in the best of moods. Never use Service Master for anything; I am going to write letters and yell on the phone to whoever will listen about their shitty, overpriced, and deceitful service. They are on my enemy list.
Given the suddenly decreased amount of money in the bank account, I suspect I will be outfitting all my furniture via Good Will and Craigslist. Which isn't necessarily bad, per se, but the general problem I have with Craigslist is that you have to have the time to call and drive around for your scavenging, and I don't have it. (I also don't think I have the money necessary to fix the sliding glass door where the water came in. The more I think about it, the more I fantasize about going to the previous owners' new home and nailing dead weasels to their door. Thanks for the warning, assholes. Also, we are at odds over our definition of what it means for a lock to work. My definition means "door does not open, even when you pull really, really hard on it." Assholes.)
Since I have at least five other major things I could be stressing over, including my little brother getting married on Saturday, I have decided that the best thing to do is talk about Vegas. Or drink heavily, whatever.
ThorneScratch: And I leave on Monday and won't be back until next Monday.
twigcollins: For Vegas!
ThorneScratch: Yes. Man, I wish you guys were coming. It would be epic.
twigcollins: I wish I was too. Someday we will. And it will... well, it will be The Hangover.
ThorneScratch: And only two of us will lose kidneys to the pit bosses.
twigcollins: Can we limit the number of dead hookers? That was hell on my lower back last time.
ThorneScratch: We could switch to midget hookers. That way we can fit more in the bag.
twigcollins: You always say that. Like all the time. Even when I'm like "Hey, let's go to Dennys," and you're like "Yeah, Moons over My Hammy is good but it's not midget hookers."
ThorneScratch: Well, it's NOT.
ThorneScratch: Now, if you said we should go to Cracker Barrel...
Vegas was interesting. I didn't think anything could actually make me miss the humidity back home, but I think I kind of did. It's like a goddamn oven there, man; I don't know how folks stand it. I went outside precisely three times: arriving, leaving, and once to go see the fountains at the Bellagio, since I understand that is a thing one must do. It was ten at night, and it was still, like, 97 degrees outside. For fuck's sake.
It's a very shiny town. I stayed in the Bellagio, which was pretty awesome, and made me think of Ocean's 11 no less than at least once every ten minutes; they had fountains, this sort of giant glass insect sculpture garden that was a lot like the recent Alice in Wonderland movie, innumerable restaurants and shops, a painting gallery, a gelato shop, a crepe place with a chocolate fountain, geometrically implausible flower sculptures, and all sorts of other things, any of which would have pleased me on its own. I also ate sushi with poprocks in it, which was a gastronomically interesting experience.
I'm sure I only saw, like, ten percent of what the place had to offer because I was working the entire time I was there. The few occasions I had enough time to sit down and have a drink without rushing to be somewhere, I didn't have the patience (or the funding) to sit in the glitzy bars. Rather, I skulked on my own to the VIP lounge, where there was free booze and soda, and often chocolate-dipped strawberries. It was one of the few advantages of being working staff.
Slots confuse me. Apparently you can't just yank the handle; you have to actually do… something. Pick lines? I have no idea. And they all have different themes; I don't know if I'm supposed to be trying to line up pictures of coins or fruit or sea-creatures or hillbillies. I'm no good at gambling; I won my money through sheer luck, in the manner that a shrieking monkey pounding on a typewriter might produce the occasional sentence. Occasionally cocktail waitresses would go by, and my God, were there some cold, lifeless eyes among the bunch. Given the high amount of makeup and low amount of clothes that I assume they're required to wear, and the number of drunken idiots careening about that they have to cater to, I can hardly blame them.
I saw three Vegas weddings in the hotel chapel, seventeen people dressed up as Elvis (unrelated to the weddings), innumerable slutty outfits (the best of which was actually on one of our cardiologist attendees; I took a picture with my phone), re-directed twenty-two plastic surgeons from our cardiology conference to their facial reconstruction conference (seriously, we had signs and ginormous heart scans everywhere; it made me seriously worry about ever going in for plastic surgery because I might get someone who can't tell the difference between a goddamn cheek implant and a myocardial bridge), and MacGyvered two oversized abstract posters so they would fit on the poster boards.
On our first day, a flurry of text messages began circulating amongst the staff regarding celebrity sightings. According to the staff member who first reported it, Carrot Top was in the casino, surrounded by an entourage of scantily clad women. This continued, each message slightly downgrading each time, until it became simply that Carrot Top was at the bar, with one woman in a low-cut top. "But he looks really roided up," the staffer concluded, which we all agreed was quite possible. The other celebrity we saw was a doctor celebrity, so he wasn't quite as interesting as a musclebound Carrot Top.
There was some kind of sewage back-up on the Strip while we were there, and for a couple hours, all the five star hotels smelled a lot like shit and/or natural gas. Good times.
I also commend the Bellagio for being the only hotel so far where I've managed to figure out how to set the alarm clock and have it go off with a minimum of bewildering cursing on my part and blaring bizarre music on theirs. (Though the turndown service would always leave the television turned on to weird country-jazz fusion stations, and I would have to fumble around, trying to figure out how to turn it off.)
Also, awesome bathtubs. Any time I wasn't working or coughing my way across the smoky casino floor, I was in my ornate marble bathtub and giving serious consideration about how to become a mermaid so I wouldn't have to get out again. My greatest regret was that I never got to use the swimming pool; I might have never left.
On the trip home, we came in with some thunderstorms and had to circle the airport a few times, waiting to land. This was frustrating, but seeing the lighting close up was more interesting than terrifying, and eventually I was on home soil.
Life isn't all bad, I suppose. The rain may have flooded my house, but at least my basil plant is thriving. And I got to use my Luke Cage icon. You gotta focus on the little things.
Given the suddenly decreased amount of money in the bank account, I suspect I will be outfitting all my furniture via Good Will and Craigslist. Which isn't necessarily bad, per se, but the general problem I have with Craigslist is that you have to have the time to call and drive around for your scavenging, and I don't have it. (I also don't think I have the money necessary to fix the sliding glass door where the water came in. The more I think about it, the more I fantasize about going to the previous owners' new home and nailing dead weasels to their door. Thanks for the warning, assholes. Also, we are at odds over our definition of what it means for a lock to work. My definition means "door does not open, even when you pull really, really hard on it." Assholes.)
Since I have at least five other major things I could be stressing over, including my little brother getting married on Saturday, I have decided that the best thing to do is talk about Vegas. Or drink heavily, whatever.
ThorneScratch: And I leave on Monday and won't be back until next Monday.
twigcollins: For Vegas!
ThorneScratch: Yes. Man, I wish you guys were coming. It would be epic.
twigcollins: I wish I was too. Someday we will. And it will... well, it will be The Hangover.
ThorneScratch: And only two of us will lose kidneys to the pit bosses.
twigcollins: Can we limit the number of dead hookers? That was hell on my lower back last time.
ThorneScratch: We could switch to midget hookers. That way we can fit more in the bag.
twigcollins: You always say that. Like all the time. Even when I'm like "Hey, let's go to Dennys," and you're like "Yeah, Moons over My Hammy is good but it's not midget hookers."
ThorneScratch: Well, it's NOT.
ThorneScratch: Now, if you said we should go to Cracker Barrel...
Vegas was interesting. I didn't think anything could actually make me miss the humidity back home, but I think I kind of did. It's like a goddamn oven there, man; I don't know how folks stand it. I went outside precisely three times: arriving, leaving, and once to go see the fountains at the Bellagio, since I understand that is a thing one must do. It was ten at night, and it was still, like, 97 degrees outside. For fuck's sake.
It's a very shiny town. I stayed in the Bellagio, which was pretty awesome, and made me think of Ocean's 11 no less than at least once every ten minutes; they had fountains, this sort of giant glass insect sculpture garden that was a lot like the recent Alice in Wonderland movie, innumerable restaurants and shops, a painting gallery, a gelato shop, a crepe place with a chocolate fountain, geometrically implausible flower sculptures, and all sorts of other things, any of which would have pleased me on its own. I also ate sushi with poprocks in it, which was a gastronomically interesting experience.
I'm sure I only saw, like, ten percent of what the place had to offer because I was working the entire time I was there. The few occasions I had enough time to sit down and have a drink without rushing to be somewhere, I didn't have the patience (or the funding) to sit in the glitzy bars. Rather, I skulked on my own to the VIP lounge, where there was free booze and soda, and often chocolate-dipped strawberries. It was one of the few advantages of being working staff.
Slots confuse me. Apparently you can't just yank the handle; you have to actually do… something. Pick lines? I have no idea. And they all have different themes; I don't know if I'm supposed to be trying to line up pictures of coins or fruit or sea-creatures or hillbillies. I'm no good at gambling; I won my money through sheer luck, in the manner that a shrieking monkey pounding on a typewriter might produce the occasional sentence. Occasionally cocktail waitresses would go by, and my God, were there some cold, lifeless eyes among the bunch. Given the high amount of makeup and low amount of clothes that I assume they're required to wear, and the number of drunken idiots careening about that they have to cater to, I can hardly blame them.
I saw three Vegas weddings in the hotel chapel, seventeen people dressed up as Elvis (unrelated to the weddings), innumerable slutty outfits (the best of which was actually on one of our cardiologist attendees; I took a picture with my phone), re-directed twenty-two plastic surgeons from our cardiology conference to their facial reconstruction conference (seriously, we had signs and ginormous heart scans everywhere; it made me seriously worry about ever going in for plastic surgery because I might get someone who can't tell the difference between a goddamn cheek implant and a myocardial bridge), and MacGyvered two oversized abstract posters so they would fit on the poster boards.
On our first day, a flurry of text messages began circulating amongst the staff regarding celebrity sightings. According to the staff member who first reported it, Carrot Top was in the casino, surrounded by an entourage of scantily clad women. This continued, each message slightly downgrading each time, until it became simply that Carrot Top was at the bar, with one woman in a low-cut top. "But he looks really roided up," the staffer concluded, which we all agreed was quite possible. The other celebrity we saw was a doctor celebrity, so he wasn't quite as interesting as a musclebound Carrot Top.
There was some kind of sewage back-up on the Strip while we were there, and for a couple hours, all the five star hotels smelled a lot like shit and/or natural gas. Good times.
I also commend the Bellagio for being the only hotel so far where I've managed to figure out how to set the alarm clock and have it go off with a minimum of bewildering cursing on my part and blaring bizarre music on theirs. (Though the turndown service would always leave the television turned on to weird country-jazz fusion stations, and I would have to fumble around, trying to figure out how to turn it off.)
Also, awesome bathtubs. Any time I wasn't working or coughing my way across the smoky casino floor, I was in my ornate marble bathtub and giving serious consideration about how to become a mermaid so I wouldn't have to get out again. My greatest regret was that I never got to use the swimming pool; I might have never left.
On the trip home, we came in with some thunderstorms and had to circle the airport a few times, waiting to land. This was frustrating, but seeing the lighting close up was more interesting than terrifying, and eventually I was on home soil.
Life isn't all bad, I suppose. The rain may have flooded my house, but at least my basil plant is thriving. And I got to use my Luke Cage icon. You gotta focus on the little things.