Fun and Games Dept

Jeff and Mark from North Carolina are visiting for the weekend. Jeff’s family lives north of Phoenix and they decided to wrap up their visit with a stop here in Tucson. It was great to see them.

Mark is celebrating a birthday this weekend, and Chris and Mike made a Guinness-chocolate cake to celebrate. It was wonderful.

The Sonoran Desert is slowing moving toward it’s characteristic desert look as we move away from Monsoon Season 2021. Things became very green during the uncharacteristically rainy monsoon season. The rain was a good thing, because we needed to break the drought, but now the grasses the popped up are turning brown and I’m a little concerned they will contribute to wildfires later on.

This is a shot from the first or second look out along the road to the top of Mount Lemmon, about six miles to the north of our home.

Tomorrow, ABBA will release another song from their upcoming album “Voyage”. It’s still so weird to type that.

Originally recorded in 1978 but discarded and never finished, ABBA has finally finished “Just A Notion”. Out tomorrow, there are some snippets of the now finished track available on YouTube today.

Enjoy.

After seven hours of driving across the desert, we arrived at home just in time for dinner with the family. And, another spectacular sunset.

It was a very good long weekend in Las Vegas. I feel relaxed. I intend to hold on to that feeling.

Tomorrow we head home to Tucson and I can say it’s been a very nice time in Vegas but I’ve had my fill. We’ve been staying at the Downtown Grand near “The Fremont Experience”. There’s plenty of LED screens, loud music, and people flying by on zip lines. It’s a lot of fun, but I feel like we’ve done it for this trip and that’s all good.

It’s been too long since I’ve done so much people watching. It’s different now than what it used to be. The pandemic changed us all. Politics are everywhere. I passed a Vietnam Vet in a wheelchair who appeared to have Parkinson’s Disease. He was carrying a big poster of President Biden dressed up as a member of the Taliban. Many folks around him were offering to buy the Vietnam Vet a beer. I don’t know if it was for his service or his political beliefs.

And a quick aside, on this trip I noticed gas prices have gone up quite a bit in the past couple of weeks. Someone put stickers all over the fuel pump. The stickers had picture of Biden saying “I did this”. For those that are stupid, the President of the United States does not set the price of gasoline. It’s called capitalism, and gas prices are going up it’s because of supply and demand, not some edict from the Oval Office. Grow up.

I’m going home with a little more money than I brought and we are well under our gambling budget for this trip. We walked “the Strip” this afternoon and had a nice time. The Fremont Street and the Strip are like two completely different Vegas experiences. I like them both, in moderation. Two and a half days have been enough.

So I’m not sure how I feel about this restaurant. It’s called the “Heart Attack” and you can weigh yourself on the way in. The scale is huge with a large LED readout for everyone with an interest to gaze upon. If you weigh more than 350 lbs., you eat for free. There are signs talking about lobster and steak. I don’t know what the prices are for folks that weigh less than 350 lbs.

I’ve known plenty of folks weighing more than 350 lbs. over the years. I wonder how they would feel about the theming around this restaurant. I know that being that heavy increases health concerns, in many cases dramatically, but most folks of any size seem happy with their weight.

Honestly, the first thing that crossed my mind when I saw this restaurant was, “only in the good ol’ U.S. of A.”. We live in odd times.

We were married in a legal ceremony 10 years ago this past Wednesday. We would have done it sooner but the government, and too many in the populace, felt the gays shouldn’t be legally married so while we’ve been together for over 25 years, as of this week we’ve been legally married for a decade.

We were married in a casino so it’s only fitting that we are celebrating a decade of legally wedded bliss in Las Vegas. My husband arranged this entire trip. We drove across the desert today and arrived in plenty of time for dinner. As of this writing, we have both doubled our daily allowance for gambling purposes. We are having fun and our inhibitions are loose. Make of that what you will.

I just know that I’m blissfully happy, both before this trip to Vegas and during this trip to Vegas. The rest of the family is home with Truman, and send their well wishes.

Can you find my note?

Good morning, world! I just took the photo above by putting my iPhone against the glass of my office window and holding very still.

It looks to be a beautiful sunrise. In the distance I hear howls of excitement from coyotes.

Perhaps they’re celebrating the new day.

Here’s a photo I took 20 minutes ago from one of the windows in our stairwell. Some artifacts from the glass of the window pane showed up in this one.