It's (Not Yet) Curtains For Us

This house has no curtains. Lisa has put insulating panels in some of the windows and decorative paper in others to make the place look more lived-in. She has been considering what sort of curtains to install. Having seen some Levelor cordless blinds that looked attractive to her, we thought we'd buy one set to see how easy they are to install. Having measured the window, we went over to purchase one set. They cut the blinds to width while you're there. Unfortunately, all of the pre-packaged blinds are 72 inches high or more, while the window we wanted to use as a test is only 34 inches high. We figured that this would give us too much slack. To have shorter blinds is a custom order that costs twice as much as the pre-packaged blinds. (Twice the cost for half the material; go figure.) Furthermore, they couldn't tell us which style of cordless blind the custom order would be. (There are two different mechanisms; one is a button, while the other is a handle, and their computer doesn't seem to distinguish between them.) So we ended up going away having purchased nothing.

Quiet Christmas

We've been taking it relatively easy over this four-day holiday weekend other than the expedition to Reno on Friday. For breakfast this Christmas morning, Kuma Bear joined us while we had smoked salmon on toasted bagels. We offered him all the salmon he could eat, but he seemed content with the smell. This year we didn't try to feed him salmon putty.

Laundering Money

We hadn't actually planned on going out for Christmas, but on the spur of the moment, we drove in to Sparks and had a Christmas Buffet at Orozko at the Nugget. This was an excellent buffet, including non-alcoholic drinks for $30. The menu probably won't be still up there very long, but it included Seafood Newburg, Grilled Pancetta Wrapped Salmon Medallions with Sweet Yellow Curry Sauce, Grilled Pork Medallions with Wild Mushroom Sauce, and (not listed on the published menu) roast lamb on the carving station. (Orozko being a Basque-influenced restaurant, you'd expect it to have lamb, and theirs was quite good, not needing any condiments.)

There was so much good stuff that we didn't have the capacity to try it all, and we deliberately were trying to take small portions of everything. The desserts were also quite good. I felt a little bad about having the pumpkin cheesecake and also a slice of the chocolate cake, but we did later walk several laps around the casino, also making a circuit of the basement and ballroom levels, and a blood sugar check two hours later showed me as normal, so I guess it wasn't too bad.

There had been no wait to get into Orozko, although we did have to check it out carefully, because they had loud music playing in the bar/waiting area, and Lisa needed to make sure that there was seating available in the back where the music wasn't so obnoxious. It was still intrusive in the buffet, but at least at our table we weren't being bothered by music so loud it interferes with thinking.

The Nugget's general buffet, the Rotisserie, had a special Christmas menu as well, and was $7 less. The queue for that was at least twenty people deep, and got longer all evening. I never would have waited through that queue; moreover, I think Orozko's food selection was better than the main buffet. I wonder how many people queuing there realized that they could get a better selection with no wait for only $7 more just by walking to the other end of the casino?

After dinner, we played a little bit of slots, and we had minor luck, winning about enough to pay for the tip on dinner and to do laundry tomorrow, which is where the title of this post comes from. We then went to play a little pinball, but to our disgust, all of the pinball machines are broken in one way or another that wasn't obvious until we'd already put our money into them. We then headed home to Fernley after having had a generally pleasant evening.