I accomplished very little on Saturday.  I slept late (hey, 2pm only felt like noon to me) and hung out with family.  I convinced my dubious parents to try Thai food, got all the orders for them, my brother and his wife (they didn't need convincing on Thai food) and ordered from my local go-to Thai place, Grand Thai.  While I was waiting for my order, I managed to cobble my broken glasses together with a twist-tie and a toothpick.  It wasn't pretty, but at least they stayed on my head.  We all met up at my brother's place, and the food went over very well with everyone.  I couldn't help missing Sweetee Thai a little, but Grand Thai is also excellent. 

The big thing was getting to spend some time with my neice, who's not quite a year old, and the all-time champion for both the cutest and best-behaved baby competitions.  Having her burbling and laughing as she was passed from one adult to another while the others chowed down was the ultimate in dinnertime entertainment. 

So Saturday down, I resolved to get down to business Sunday before my flight left at 5:15pm (Central).  This is why snooze buttons on alarm clocks are a bad idea.  When I finally dragged myself into consciousness, it was just after noon.  I called the place I'd gotten my glasses, explaining I just needed a new left temple to screw onto the hinge.  The woman on the phone reacted as if I'd asked for a new dilithium crystal for my warp reactor.  "We don't do welding," she explained.  After a futile attempt to explain that welding wouldn't be necessary or even desirable, she suggested I try their Mall of America store, which appearently has a machine shop in the back or something.

I used to work at MOA, and I try to avoid it now.  Luckily, I had backup, as I called Baroque and he said he wanted to come along to look for some stuff for his Halloween costume.  A few steps inside and I remembered why I dislike the MOA so much... people walk so damn slow there!  And always they walk abreast, blocking as much of the hallway as possible, but with just barely too little space to get between them. 

After a couple of stops, I found a place that said they'd be willing to try a temporary fix to get me through the week.  The cute, criminally underage girl who took my glasses (Baroque said he thought she might be 18, and I explained that that was still underage for someone past 30) started to work on them, then turned back and warned that she couldn't be held responsible if she broke them further while trying to fix them.  Well, they couldn't be of much less use to me, so I agreed.  Basically, she put shrink-tubing on them, like you would if you were manufacturing a cable.  I think the toothpick might actually have worked better.

This whole adventure left me without time to run to my office, which I'd needed to do, or go shopping for some of the things I'd found out I needed in CA... like sunscreen.  Actually, I hadn't even repacked yet.  I gave Baroque the certificate good for double Reward Zone points at select local Best Buys (triple if you spend $2,000 or more) from 7-9pm (Central) that day, since I'd be in the air at the time.  Damn, though... that would have been perfect to use on picking up my HDTV, which I've decided will be my reward to myself for this whole ordeal and for the massive overtime I'm racking up.

I got smart on the packing this time: I took just the discs for games, carried in a CD wallet, rather than the whole cases.  I got down to just my laptop bag (with PS2, camera, and other delicate items inside) and 1 checked bag.  The flight was uneventful, and somehow that ordeal on Friday seems to have left me with the ability to sleep on airplanes, because I snoozed through most of the trip.  I did wake up in time to see the sun set over the surreal California landscape, though.  It hardly looks real, which opens all sorts of jokes about Southern CA that are just too easy to bother with.

Bill (he was suckered into coming back, too) and I went to pick up the rental, and he disappeared inside for quite a while, trying to get a smaller vehicle since it was just the two of us rather than a group like before.  He ended up with an Explorer, which we loaded and pulled halfway out of the parking space before he decided it was garbage and went back in to get something else.  Another wait and we ended up with a Tahoe more to his liking, and pulled up at the hotel (a different one this time) around 10pm Pacific. 

We checked in and found our rooms, then nearly collided in the hall as we went out to see if the other had an overpowering paint smell in his room.  We called down and got switched to two other rooms, but mine still smelled like paint, and neither of us liked the one-bedroom suite as opposed to the studio.  The one-bedroom ones were too cramped, and the kitchens weren't as nice.  We got moved again, to another building.  Bill got room 332, I got 333.  Except there is no room 333.  I called down again, and finally got a key brought up for a room that was both free of paint fumes and non-imaginary.

Overall, I liked the look of this place better.  There's no seperation between living, sleeping, and kitchen spaces, but it flows nicely.  Only one TV, but it rotates to face whatever area you're using.  Later that night I went to hook up my PS2, though, and found that there's no inputs.  Not one.  All covered up by their TV Commander hardware.  Supressing my panic, I called the front desk.  They told me that there was 2 TV's in the common area that had inputs, and I was free to use them 24/7.  I'm not about to carry my PS2 and associated cables across the courtyard to the common building every time I want to play a game, so I had to improvise...

I had brought my Adaptec Gamebridge along this time, to capture some Okami footage, and that ended up saving me.  It isn't the best setup (in fact, it's pretty crappy), but I gots to have my Okami fix somehow.

As I post this, it's already old news--I actually typed it up yesterday, and much has happened since then.  But that'll have to be a story for another post...