Kevin Standlee: Fandom Is My Way of Life

There is a fish and chips food truck that visits Fernley around once a month. For some reason, I typically get notifications of them coming here after they've already moved on to a different city. This time, I knew they would be here today, stopping at Big R Ranch & Home. As it happens, I needed to go there anyway. The water pump on the swamp cooler has stopped pumping. I think there's just been too much hard water build-up in it. Also, the pads into which the water is pumped have too much build-up in them. It's easier to just replace the pump and pads than to try and clean them. So I went over to Big R, bought the swamp cooler parts, and went outside to get some fish.

( On The Hook )

It was pretty good fish.

It's the start of the month and time for a new episode of Railway Legends, Myths, and Stories. While this month's episode is called "A Fish Story," I promise that — unlike last month — the only thing fishy about this story is the contents of the cars.

A while ago, Lisa and I bought some Alaska salmon from a roadside vendor who had brought a bunch of it down to these parts. Because of the way it was packaged, each frozen package had enough fish for two meals for Lisa and me. A few days ago, Lisa took the last package out of the freezer and made the first meal, using a nice mustard sauce glaze. Tonight we have the last of the fish. It is very good, worth what we paid for it and more (it was not cheap), and I hope that they make another trip to these parts again someday.

Kuma Bear approves of our dining choices. Lisa shared a small piece with him.

Aspirin and antibiotics are holding Lisa's toothache at bay, and as she was up as early as I was — I only slept in about 30 minutes later than my usual alarm — she suggested that we go in to the Peppermill and have Saturday brunch (a much better value than Sunday brunch) and do our shopping. So off we went.

( Bear Knows What's Important )

After brunch we took a walk around the hotel as we often do. We spotted what looked like a site visit and said so. The person from the hotel agreed that what was happening. I mentioned the Worldcon back in 2011 and she said she remembered it. Lisa and I keep thinking that a Westercon could be made to fit into the grand ballroom at the Peppermill, but Down That Path Lies Madness.

We then took care of some shopping errands. Lisa was looking for a particular woodworking tool, so we went to a woodworking shop in South Reno, where we found it right away (and US made, too; it looks like a lot of these tools are niche market, small volume, and thus don't make the necessary volume to make by the millions in China). There's a Winco nearby, albeit not the one we usually frequent in Sparks, so we did our large shopping as well.

One of the things about Raley's opening in Fernley was supposed to be that we wouldn't need to do as much running around Reno. Unfortunately, something we expected to appear at Fernley Raley's hasn't shown up yet, and something Lisa used to get at Winco is now discontinued there. However, we did find that ex-Winco item is stocked at a SaveMart on Kitzke Lane, so we now have yet another grocery store to visit when we do the rounds in Reno. Also on our travels, we found that the fancy meat market in Reno, Butcher Boy, has not actually closed the way we thought when we saw that their former home was up for least, but has instead moved to a place not too far from the Peppermill. Now we have yet another shop in Reno we'll have to frequent.

There were other things we might have done after that, but by then the brunch was making both of us sleepy, so we headed home and took shelter in the air conditioning. Besides, I had a lot of Worldcon e-mail to answer and deal with today, as we're getting down near the home stretch for Worldcon 76.

On Friday evening, when I decided to not drive to Yuba City that night but instead go down early the next day, Lisa reminded me that we'd been meaning to try the (relatively) new Flame Grill restaurant over near Scolari's grocery store here in Fernley. Every time we've passed them, we've seen their sign advertising "Friday Fish Fest" and thinking it would be nice to try it.

Well, the Flame Grill is a bar-grill, and Lisa said it smelled too much of beer. Furthermore, it turns out that the "Friday Fish Fest" is simply the fish and chips from their regular menu. So we balked and went to the Black Bear Diner instead. They used to have an all-you-can-eat fish fry on Fridays, but I think we contributed toward them giving up on that.

The Black Bear had a nice salmon dish that Lisa liked (travelswithkuma got to have all the fish he could eat). I opted for their Friday prime rib special, which I thought was pretty good, too. We then took advantage of a free-play coupon for the adjoining Fernley Nugget casino, and ended up $2.50 ahead. That's nice, but not as nice as what happened to the person who we heard whooping and hollering as we were finishing dinner. As I went up to redeem the $10 free-play coupon, there was much excitement behind the counter as they were drawing up the paperwork for a Big Win (which is to say anything that requires them to issue an IRS Form W2-G proceeds from gambling). Someone had hit a $2000 jackpot.

We took our $2.50 and went home. I had to get to bed in order to be up at 5 AM the next morning for the trip to Yuba City about which I've already written.

As travelswithkuma gets over his annual bath, I found some good safety advice that I'm sure he would approve of. The poster reads (in Russian), "Don't Walk on Fish."

This poster was in a collection of Soviet-era safety posters, some of which are pretty scary.