Back To Normal...Whatever That Is

Okay, okay, due to the high volume of requests (3) I need to bring my readers up to date on the family's recent activity, namely the garage sale (me and Nancy) and the Vegas trip (PhillyTwo).

As luck would have it, our one and only garage sale coincided with Dandridge's one and only dog parade and on Saturday morning every living soul in Jefferson County was marching his pooch up and down Main Street rather than putting him to better use - sniffing out the one-of-a-kind treasures we had waiting on the carport, which begs the question, why call it a garage sale, when clearly there is no garage? Nevertheless, Nancy managed to unload all of her "big-ticket" items, so I'd have to say it was a successful day. As for me, I could fill my car up with gas and then go to the movie, but I'd have to choose between popcorn and a coke. My "rake" wouldn't cover both.

Now for PhillyTwo. Where to begin. She decided not to catch her flight back on Thursday, and I can't really say for sure if she truly regrets that decision, but certainly, it's been interesting. First, one day last week her friend, Bud, came to the sudden realization that he didn't want to live in Vegas any longer, so he was going to pack his worldly possessions into the piece-of-shit cop car that he had bought at auction before he left Knoxville back in May, and he was going to drive back across the country. Pronto. Trouble was, PhillyTwo wanted to stay in Vegas at least until Sunday, to play in the tournament at Binion's. Bud, on the other hand, was hell-bent on leaving immediately. She had to talk him down, which took some doing. Timing was everything. The last day of the month happened to be on Friday, which meant he had to be out of his house by then. PhillyTwo scored a room at the Fremont Hotel on (oddly enough) Fremont Street, using her player's points, so they were squared away until Monday. He reluctantly agreed to it. Now, the Fremont is no Caesar's Palace, but according to PhillyTwo, it wasn't horrible. And it was cheap. $50 for the first night and the next two nights were free. Plus, dining on Fremont Street is nothing like dining on the Strip. The food is dirt cheap. All-you-can-eat prime rib and lobster dinners for under $10. Shrimp cocktails for $4.99. What more could you want? Hopefully, not a pool, 'cause there wasn't one at the Fremont. But other than that...

Well, she didn't win the big tournament at Binion's on Sunday, but they apparently had a pretty good time, eating, drinking and gambling on the cheap ($3 blackjack) while they were there. And the trip home? That was another story. Besides the spare tire, Bud kept a shitload of coolant and oil in the trunk of that old police cruiser, if that tells you anything. And they still had to stop at a Walmart in Oklahoma to restock the coolant because Car 54 Where Are You? was drinking it faster than he could pour it. But that wasn't the half of it. Some over-zealous state trooper in New Mexico pulled them over for allegedly changing lanes without signalling. He made Bud get out of the car and sit in the state trooper car, where he proceeded to grill him about everything. That was when I got the first dreaded phone call from PhillyTwo, which was interrupted when the trooper came up to her window and ask her a bunch of questions, probably trying to see if her answers matched up with his. Most of them did. Then he told her that her friend Bud was acting very nervous, so he was going to search their car. He said she could sit in his car while he made the search. How nice. That was when I got the second, even more dreaded, phone call. "I'm in the back of a police car, inches from a very large drug dog, while two state troopers are looking through my luggage." Just what a mother wants to hear. Of course, they were clean. And Bud didn't even get a ticket, which tells me that the troopers were on a witch hunt. After that, the over-heating car seemed like no big deal. The wayward travelers, or as I like to call them, Gunther Tootie and Francis Muldoon, pulled in at around eleven o'clock yesterday morning. And all's well that ends well.