Beware of the Haggis

Thanks to this article by Cheryl, I now know the source of the headgear I'm wearing in the userpic attached to this message, and lots of other things I did not know before. See all the stuff you can learn on the Internet?

Hitting the Road

I will be shutting down here in a few minutes to walk over to the Centerville train station in the driving rain to catch a Capitol train to Coliseum and then bus to Oakland Airport, on my way to Reno on the initial leg of this ten-day trip. I'm traveling pretty heavy, with my briefcase, backpack, and two pieces of rolling luggage (one of which is the data projector from work and which fortunately I don't have to bring back with me). No point in taking an umbrella because I won't have a spare hand with which to hold it.

Arrived in Reno

My flight from Oakland to Reno was delayed 30-45 minutes (about the same amount of time as it was in the air once it did leave), but that didn't bother me, on account of I didn't get to the airport until an hour before the flight, and didn't get through Terrorization until about 30 minutes pre-flight, thanks to all of the queues. The flight was short and uneventful, and it was much drier (and colder) in Reno than in Oakland. I called the Holiday Inn to ask about the shuttle, and the front desk clerk said, "Someone was just asking for you."

"Was she wearing a yellow jacket?" I asked, and when told yes, I said, "Tell her that her husband just arrived at the airport and will be there as soon as the shuttle can get him there."

Once I got to the hotel, we got checked into the room and Lisa took a well-needed bath. She told me that she had to replace the battery on the little pickup at Redding, and that we'll need to buy a new starter motor tomorrow, because the starter is making unhappy "I'm going to die soon" noises.

This being a Holiday Inn rather than a Holiday Inn Express, it has fewer amenities. No refrigerator or microwave. And there's only one chair in the room. The room is okay for a single person, but less convenient for two. And unlike the relatively robust wired internet service like that at Yuba City's HIX, this Holiday Inn has weak and unreliable wireless instead. There's not enough bandwidth, for instance, for me to stream the cricket from Australia. And the TV doesn't have ESPN2, so I can't watch the tennis, either. Oh, well, that's the breaks.

After Lisa got cleaned up, we headed over to the Nugget in Sparks to have our favorite meal, shrimp pan roast. Somehow I doubt this will be the last time we have this meal during the ten days we'll be up here in the area.

After dinner we went looking for a grocery store to get a small number of things. Not as many as we would have bought if we had a refrigerator, though, and it makes breakfast a hassle.

Gambling? We haven't done any of that yet. Lisa is unhappy that the slot machines have mostly been converted to the no-coin types that issue a payment slip when you take your winnings. She said, "If I wanted to play that way, I could do it on the internet." Whether I'll have time to play any blackjack during this trip remains to be seen.