Passionate kisses - somebody was talking about hello/goodbye kisses that don’t seem to mean as much anymore, which brought that phrase to my mind. B and I were never into the peck on the cheek every morning stuff; I leave the house around 6:15 each morning and B gets up to walk me to the door and say goodbye though. I think Lucinda Williamsdid it first, but I liked Mary’s video better
It just has me sitting here thinking of the little things that you do with somebody you are living with, as well as the little things that you put up with. I said live with, not married to, as there are far too many people now that are living with somebody they are not married to, either by choice or because the law doesn’t let them get married (those hypocritical politicians), but that is another topic left to other posts. I’ve been married to B, my first wife, for quite a while now (no, I am not planning ahead, but D …) and I am sure that there are things that both of us do that annoy the other; heck, there are things I do that annoy me. There was a time when those things bothered me, but I guess as you get old you either become a crotchety complainer or you get mellow, and I’ve decided that it is a lot easier to look at the fun enjoyable side of things than to complain about them. My main complaint deals with those two vicious dogs that permit us to share their bed. For some reason I end up with one on each side of me, which makes it rather hard to reach over and grab B without one or both getting mad at the disturbance and growling. It takes a little effort to throw two nine pound fuzzballs out the door, and some concentration to ignore the subsequent whining and scratching to get back in (no, not mine, the dogs). It still is a lot better than having a three year old wander in.
Don’t know why, but for some reason that reminded me of that man of mine (no, not mine, but . . .) and look, YT has one version of it. (I really am amused by the dancing part)
Rather than continue on with the living stuff, which will probably take me a lot longer to write about, it would be easier to just tell you what is going on around here. The big jewelry show closed a few days ago, and it sure is nice and quiet around the office. Quite a few people were off yesterday, trying to compensate for all of the hours and frustrations that come with having such a large crowd here. The food service crew was particularly overloaded, having several food courts and outlying setups above and beyond the four build in serving places in the blockhouses. In addition to standard fare there were serving stations for Chinese, Indian and kosher food. This show was light on the booze though; talking to Tiffany (the person in charge of the bars and liquid refreshment) she had no problems with this show, almost no alcohol was requested. It seems that people handling jewelry and expensive small items do not tend to partake of liquid refreshment very much, must have something to do with all of the money floating around. She said the last show, which dealt with home furnishings, was a real effort, with 69 bar setups and more alcohol served than the fashion shows. It looks like people that deal with furniture tend to entertain each other and customers with a drink in hand. Poor Tiff, she had to insure that all the bars were stocked, cleaned, there was glassware on site and that enough bartenders were on hand to take care of the crowds. She put so many hours in on that show that she took off a week to recover from it.
I walked through our lower hall coming in this morning, and even after a day and two nights of packing and moving out, it still looks like there is more stuff in there than during the show. I thought that this show would pack up and be out of here quickly, but since each booth had lots of glass cases and counters and lights I guess that the packing carefully takes a lot more time. The center aisle is filled with wooden crates waiting to be loaded, and there is trash and packing material scattered all over. It looks more like a landfill area than a show hall, which is why guests and attendees normally only see the pretty side of things. I have no idea how they can keep track of packing up over three thousand booths covering over a million square feet of space, the logistics of bringing in the correct packing boxes, getting things taken apart and packed without breaking all of that glass, and shipping stuff off to the owners scattered all over the world must be tremendous. All of this after setting it up just a week ago, and having to then put tens of thousands of packing crates someplace while the show was running and get them back here into the right booths to reload. And it’s got to be finished by tomorrow, as the next show opens Monday and that show needs a few days to set up. The police cars were gone from our sidewalk out front, but the space is now filled by big truck trailers waiting for the fork lift trucks to fill them with those wooden packing crates. Our loading docks out back are also filled with trucks, in addition to those in the halls. But stuff inside has to be moved to trucks outside in order to make room for more trucks to pull right into the halls for filling.
Yesterday a storm rolled through the valley. We even had water falling from the sky when I walked out to my car after work. At least I hope it was rain and not a construction worker up on the top of the new tower that didn’t want to walk over to the little building. The wind was pretty impressive: that was one of the two things I still find about Vegas that no one told us about. The wind was gusting over 50mph, which resulted in our trash cans, lawn furniture, and everything else not bolted down moving about the yard. I hope nothing made it over the wall and we still have all of our stuff left. We also have some nice brass Solari bells hanging around out there, which were making quite a lot of noise as well as the wind blowing down the bathroom and kitchen exhaust vents. One of our dogs is really disturbed by noises, he usually shivers and tries to hide under your butt whenever a breeze comes up, but last night he seemed to do quite well, I guess he is getting used to it. It was rather pleasant to lie in bed and listen to the storm outside; this happens quite often so it is not an unusual occurrence. Some clouds blew through; the cause of the aforementioned rain, but most of the time the sun was out. This also resulted in a lowering of our temperature. From a high of 94 the day before it was down to 62 last night, not supposed to get over 84 today. But it will be back up in the high 90’s by Saturday, so we are back on our Spring schedule. I did miss the first 100+ day of the year; while we were enjoying that record setting 84f sunny day in Portland it got up to 109 here.
J and I are still taking our lunchtime walk outside around the building; when it starts to get really hot we’ll move back inside the casino. We walk past the main entrance of the big hotel next door, which is not located on the Strip but down a side driveway, then to the front, over a bridge over the canal and down the Strip to the corner. Last month the sidewalk was crowded, but this week it seems almost empty out there. I was expecting a packed crowd of red tourists, but they will probably show up in a few weeks after schools are out and vacations move into full swing. With the gas prices being so high predictions show a slowdown in tourists all over the country. Each weekend we usually have 35,000 or so drive up from LA, so that might decrease or cause carpooling. Some of the hotels have reduced their weekday rates, and there are good deals around if you look. Our local paper had an article on it last Sunday, and listed some hotel rates. I was surprised that places like the MGM were almost 20% lower if you booked on their web site than if you went to the supposedly cheaper places like Pri$el!ne. So a tip if you are planning on coming out here – check rates at the resort sites, you might find a better deal there.
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